ttention.

II. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

I said a few minutes ago that the most general elements and workings of
the mind are all that the teacher absolutely needs to be acquainted with
for his purposes.

Now the _immediate_ fact which psychology, the science of mind, has to
study is also the most general fact. It is the fact that in each of us,
when awake (and often when asleep), _some kind of consciousness is
always going on_. There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves,
or fields (or of whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of
feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and
repass, and that constitute our inner life. The existence of this stream
is the primal fact, the nature and origin of it form the essential
problem, of our science. So far as we class the states or fields of
consciousness, write down their several natures, analyze their contents
into elements, or trace their habits of succession, we are on the
descriptive or analytic level. So far as we ask where they come from or
why they are just what they are, we are on the explanatory level.

In these talks with you, I shall entirely neglect the questions that
come up on the explanatory level. It must be frankly confessed that in
no fundamental sense do we know where our successive fields of
consciousness come from, or why they have the precise inner constitution
which they do have. They certainly follow or accompany our brain states,
and of course their special forms are determined by our past experiences
and education. But, if we ask just _how_ the brain conditions them, we
have not the remotest inkling of an answer to give; and, if we ask just
how the education moulds the brain, we can speak but in the most
abstract, general, and conjectural terms. On the other hand, if we
should say that they are due to a spiritual being called our Soul, which
reacts on our brain states by these peculiar forms of spiritual energy,
our words would be familiar enough, it is true; but I think you will
agree that they would offer little genuine explanatory meaning. The
truth is that we really _do not know_ the answers to the problems on the
explanatory level, even though in some directions of inquiry there may
be promising speculations to be found. For our present purposes I shall
therefore dismiss them entirely, and turn to mere description. This
state of things was what I had in mind when, a moment ago, I said there
was n