The Mind and Its Education | Page 6

for they are in the experience of all. It is, then, only by
studying these processes of consciousness that we come to know the
laws which govern the mind and its development. What it is that thinks
and feels and wills in us is too hard a problem for us here--indeed, has
been too hard a problem for the philosophers through the ages. But the
thinking and feeling and willing we can watch as they occur, and hence
come to know.
CONSCIOUSNESS AS A PROCESS OR STREAM.--In looking in
upon the mind we must expect to discover, then, not a thing, but a
process. The thing forever eludes us, but the process is always present.
Consciousness is like a stream, which, so far as we are concerned with
it in a psychological discussion, has its rise at the cradle and its end at
the grave. It begins with the babe's first faint gropings after light in his
new world as he enters it, and ends with the man's last blind gropings
after light in his old world as he leaves it. The stream is very narrow at
first, only as wide as the few sensations which come to the babe when
it sees the light or hears the sound; it grows wider as the mind develops,
and is at last measured by the grand sum total of life's experience.
This mental stream is irresistible. No power outside of us can stop it
while life lasts. We cannot stop it ourselves. When we try to stop
thinking, the stream but changes its direction and flows on. While we
wake and while we sleep, while we are unconscious under an

anæsthetic, even, some sort of mental process continues. Sometimes the
stream flows slowly, and our thoughts lag--we "feel slow"; again the
stream flows faster, and we are lively and our thoughts come with a
rush; or a fever seizes us and delirium comes on; then the stream runs
wildly onward, defying our control, and a mad jargon of thoughts takes
the place of our usual orderly array. In different persons, also, the
mental stream moves at different rates, some minds being naturally
slow-moving and some naturally quick in their operations.
Consciousness resembles a stream also in other particulars. A stream is
an unbroken whole from its source to its mouth, and an observer
stationed at one point cannot see all of it at once. He sees but the one
little section which happens to be passing his station point at the time.
The current may look much the same from moment to moment, but the
component particles which constitute the stream are constantly
changing. So it is with our thought. Its stream is continuous from birth
till death, but we cannot see any considerable portion of it at one time.
When we turn about quickly and look in upon our minds, we see but
the little present moment. That of a few seconds ago is gone and will
never return. The thought which occupied us a moment since can no
more be recalled, just as it was, than can the particles composing a
stream be re-collected and made to pass a given point in its course in
precisely the same order and relation to one another as before. This
means, then, that we can never have precisely the same mental state
twice; that the thought of the moment cannot have the same associates
that it had the first time; that the thought of this moment will never be
ours again; that all we can know of our minds at any one time is the
part of the process present in consciousness at that moment.
[Illustration: FIG. 1]
[Illustration: FIG. 2]
THE WAVE IN THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS.--The surface
of our mental stream is not level, but is broken by a wave which stands
above the rest; which is but another way of saying that some one thing
is always more prominent in our thought than the rest. Only when we
are in a sleepy reverie, or not thinking about much of anything, does

the stream approximate a level. At all other times some one object
occupies the highest point in our thought, to the more or less complete
exclusion of other things which we might think about. A thousand and
one objects are possible to our thought at any moment, but all except
one thing occupy a secondary place, or are not present to our
consciousness at all. They exist on the margin, or else are clear off the
edge of consciousness, while the one thing occupies the center. We
may be reading a fascinating book late at night in a cold room. The
charm of the writer, the beauty of the heroine, or the bravery of the
hero so occupies the mind that