ceding 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