According to the preceding exposition, the current psychological
doctrine of focus and margin is an attempt to reduce the changes in the
stimulus to terms of static entities denominated sensations and images.
By abstracting from change we convert the new stimulus that is already
on the way into inert sensory material, which lends itself to purely
analytic treatment. In this way the suggested hardness of the rock
becomes a "centrally aroused sensation" of a stubbed toe, the heat of
the candle becomes an image of a burn, etc. As was said before, the
sensations are not existences, but representatives or symbols of our
nascent activities; they are the static equivalents of this
foreshadowing or reference to the future. The explanation of experience
that we find in James and Bergson approximates this view so closely in
one respect and departs from it so widely in another as to warrant a
brief discussion.
A prominent characteristic of the doctrine advocated by James and
Bergson is the emphasis given to the foreshadowings or anticipations of
the future. Experiences of conflict, such as the struggle to recall a
name, take on their peculiar coloring, so these writers contend, from
their relationship to a beyond, to something which is yet to be. If we
are to understand experience as it really is, we must guard against the
besetting temptation to translate everything into spatial equivalents.
This forward reference is usually read off as a distinction and contrast
between simultaneously existing components. Some constituent is first
set apart as the nucleus or focus and is then enveloped with an elusive,
intangible wraith of meaning, which is called the margin. We have been
taught to think of the focus as made up of sensory material of some sort
and silhouetted against a background lit up by the fitful,
inconsequential heat-lightning of meaning. But this is a perversion of
the facts. When we are engaged in a problem it is precisely these
unformed meanings that are of interest and importance. They are in the
focus of consciousness, in so far as we can speak of a focus at all.
They absorb our attention and direct our energies. They inform us of a
margin, not by refusing to compete for our attention with more important
or more interesting facts, but by bodying forth the _unfinished_
character of the situation. Hence this beckoning, this tingling with the
sense of closeness, this sinking back when our efforts meet with defeat.
Focus and margin, in short, have to do with movement, with transition,
and not with a static field. These situations are felt as inherently
unstable and in process of reconstruction. There is a peculiar sense of
activity, of "something doing," of a future knocking on the door of the
present. What is thus on its way to the present we can designate only in
terms of the object as it is after it has arrived. To call it marginal
is to immerse the object in this temporal flux, which embodies perfectly
the characteristics of Bergsonian duration.
But this is only a first step. If we turn now to those experiences from
which this inner diremption of fact and meaning is absent, we find a
process that is essentially the same in kind. They likewise constitute a
temporal flow, even though there be no sense of duration or of change as
such. The different moments of these experiences are not mechanically
juxtaposed, but blend together in much the same way as when the process
is experienced as a process. In principle we have the same transition,
the same becoming, the same growth from less to more, the same activity
of continuous reconstruction. Conscious life, we find, is a continuous
adjustment; each of its moments is a "transitive state." The more evenly
flowing experiences are likewise endowed with a focus and margin, not in
the form of static elements, but as a dynamic relationship of what is
with what is to be.
Such an interpretation of experience, moreover, opens the way for a
proper valuation of the psychologist's procedure. The concept of
sensation is methodology pure and simple. Granted that focus and margin
are such as was indicated a moment ago, how are they to be described,
unless we resort to some _Hilfsbegriff_ such as sensations? James's
description of the effort to recall a forgotten name is not description
at all in a scientific sense, since the "wraith of the name" that we are
trying to recover is of too unearthly a fabric to be weighed and
measured by accepted scientific standards. It makes us "tingle," it lets
us "sink back," but such portrayal is literature rather than science.
Our first step must be to resolve our material into components. These
components we identify with genuine elements if we can, with pious
fictions if we must; but until this is done there can be no exact
description. There can be no precision in our statement of the facts and
no formulation of the laws that govern their changes.
This view undeniably has a certain plausibility. As long as the results
are attained which the psychologist sets out to reach, we need not be
hypersensitive on the score of methods. In the field of natural science,
at all events, this Jesuitical principle is not incompatible with
respectability. If it be true, however, that sensation is but a tool or
artifact, a means to an end, what is the end that is to be attained by
this device? It is at this point that we come to the parting of the
ways. According to the view previously elaborated, the anticipations of
the future have to do with the results of our possible acts, and
sensations are simply symbols for the various elements in our complex
motor responses. In the case of Bergson and James, however, the clue
that is furnished by response is discarded. The reference to the future,
being dissociated from behavior, is taken as evidence of an abstract or
metaphysical duration, so that experience is somehow other than it
seems; and sensation is regarded as the translation of duration into
the language of space. Associationism is justified in its belief that
reality is different from its appearance in our experience, but is
criticized for attempting to interpret the real in terms of space rather
than time. In both cases the lead of the subject-matter is abandoned in
favor of an explanation that is derived from a fourth-dimensional plane
of existence.
The suspicion that these two positions have a deep-seated affinity is
strengthened if we call to mind that the concept of sensation was
originated, not in the interests of methodology, but as the expression
of a historic preconception that mistook fiction for fact. The
fundamental error back of it was the preposterous notion that
consciousness consists of subconscious or unconscious constituents,
which by their mechanical or chemical combinations make our experience
what it is. The question which it raises and which has afflicted us even
to the present day is not primarily the question of fact, but the
question of intelligibility, as the controversy over mindstuff
abundantly attests. Whether we regard experience as made up of sensory
material, however, or as constituted in a Bergsonian fashion, is a
matter of detail; the primary question is whether a distinction between
consciousness as it appears and as it "really" is has any meaning. In so
far as this distinction is maintained, we are beating the thin air of
mythology, despite our reinterpretations and justifications. True
conversion does not consist in a renaming of old gods, but demands a
humble and a contrite heart. To call sensation an artifact, a
methodological device, without a surrender of the metaphysical
assumption that lies back of Associationism is not to correct the evil,
but is more likely to be treated as an indulgence for sins that are yet
to be committed.
This fundamental identity is presumably the reason for certain other
similarities, which would perhaps not be readily anticipated. Both
doctrines undertake to tell us what is going on behind the scenes, what
consciousness or experience "really" is. The descriptions present an
astonishing difference of vocabulary, but if we take care not to be
misled by superficial differences, we find an equally astonishing
agreement as to content. From the one side consciousness is explained as
a juxtaposition of elements; from the other as an interpenetration of
elements so complete that the parts can be neither isolated nor
distinguished from the whole. On the one hand we find a multiplicity
without unity, on the other a unity without multiplicity. In the one
account the temporal unit is a sensation devoid of internal temporal
diversity; in the other duration as such is a unity in which past,
present, and future blend into an undifferentiated whole. The one
position gathers its facts by a mystifying process called introspection;
the other obtains its results from a mystical faculty of intuition. The
difference in language remains, but both accounts lead us away into a
twilight region where words substitute themselves for facts.
As was suggested a moment ago, the contrast between ordinary experience
and something else of which it is the appearance is the result of the
failure to give proper recognition to the facts of behavior. If we
connect the forward reference of experience with the operations of our
nascent activities, we have no need of a pure duration or of bridging
the gulf between reality and its appearances. In the same way, if we
construe sensations as just symbols of our responses, we rid ourselves
of problems that are insoluble because they are unintelligible. Such
problems constitute metaphysics in the bad sense of the word, whether
they show themselves in the domain of science or of philosophy. To
describe experience by reference to such a real is to explain what we
know in terms of what we do not know. The question what is real is
absolutely sterile. Our descriptions and explanations must remain on the
same plane as the experiences with which they deal, and not seek after a
real of a different order. If we are to have an explanation of
consciousness at all, the explanation must not take us back to
hypothetical sensations that are almost but not quite experienced, nor
to a duration in which all distinctions are swallowed up, but must be
rendered in terms of other facts that dwell in the light of common day.
By way of conclusion I venture to urge once more that a proper
consideration of the facts of behavior will furnish us with a key that
will unlock many a door. The conception of stimulus and response gives
us a differentia for experience and also enables us to distinguish
within experience between consciousness and object. If, however, we
disregard behavior, we are bound to lose our way. The distinction
between the experienced and the unexperienced is either wiped out or
else is permitted to convert itself into a distinction between
appearance and reality that leads nowhere and explains nothing. The
significance of truth as the successful guidance of behavior, in
accordance with the program laid down in the organization of stimulus
and response, is lost to sight and recourse is had to a
fourth-dimensional truth or reality for the miracle of breathing life
into the dead bones of our philosophic abstractions. The study of
behavior constitutes a mode of approach that holds out the hope of
deliverance from questions that should never have been asked. We are on
a different and, let us hope, a higher level when we cease to ask how
consciousness can lay hold of passive objects, or how knowledge
_ueberhaupt_ is possible, and concern ourselves rather with the wondrous
activity whereby this plastic dance of circumstance that we call the
universe transcends the domain of mechanism and embodies itself in the
values of conscious life.