d," inside of which our centre
of energy turns like a compass-needle, as the present phase of
consciousness alters into its successor. Our whole past store of
memories floats beyond this margin, ready at a touch to come in; and
the entire mass of residual powers, impulses, and knowledges that
constitute our empirical self stretches continuously beyond it. So
vaguely drawn are the outlines between what is actual and what is only
potential at any moment of our conscious life, that it is always hard
to say of certain mental elements whether we are conscious of them or
not.

The ordinary psychology, admitting fully the difficulty of tracing the
marginal outline, has nevertheless taken for {228} granted, first, that
all the consciousness the person now has, be the same focal or
marginal, inattentive or attentive, is there in the "field" of the
moment, all dim and impossible to assign as the latter's outline may
be; and, second, that what is absolutely extra-marginal is absolutely
non-existent. and cannot be a fact of consciousness at all.

And having reached this point, I must now ask you to recall what I said
in my last lecture about the subconscious life. I said, as you may
recollect, that those who first laid stress upon these phenomena could
not know the facts as we now know them. My first duty now is to tell
you what I meant by such a statement.

I cannot but think that the most important step forward that has
occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science is
the discovery, first made in 1886, that, in certain subjects at least,
there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with its
usual centre and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of a set
of memories, thoughts, and feelings which are extra-marginal and
outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be
classed as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their presence
by unmistakable signs. I call this the most important step forward
because, unlike the other advances which psychology has made, this
discovery has revealed to us an entirely unsuspected peculiarity in the
constitution of human nature. No other step forward which psychology
has made can proffer any such claim as this.

In particular this discovery of a consciousness existing beyond the
field, or subliminally as Mr. Myers terms it, casts light on many
phenomena of religious biography. That is why I have to advert to it
now, althoug