, 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