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.
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