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 no 'new psychology' worthy of the name.

_We have thus fields of consciousness_,--that is the first general fact;
and the second general fact is that the concrete fields are always
complex. They contain sensations of our bodies and of the objects around
us, memories of past experiences and thoughts of distant things,