248 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 



he construes a life. And again, the painter-artist 

 might well say that he is concerned only with 

 colored paints as such. Yet none the less through 

 them as registers and indices, he reveals to us 

 the mysteries of sunny meadow, shady forest, and 

 twilight wave. These are the things-in-themselves 

 of which the oils on his palette are phenomena. 



So the preoccupation of the psychologist with 

 states of consciousness may signify that they are 

 the media, the concrete conditions to which he 

 purposely reduces his material, in order, through 

 them, as methodological helps, to get at and under 

 stand that which is anything but a state of con 

 sciousness. To him, however, who insists upon the 

 fixed and final limitation of psychology, the state 

 of consciousness is not the shape some fact takes 

 from the exigency of investigation; it is literally 

 the full fact itself. It is not an intervening term ; 

 it bounds the horizon. Here, then, the issue de 

 fines itself. I conceive that states of conscious 

 ness (and I hope you will take the phrase broadly 

 enough to cover all the specific data of psy-4 

 chology) have no existence before the psychologist 

 begins to work. He brings them into existence. 

 I What we are really after is the process of ex 

 perience, the way in which it arises and behaves. 

 We want to know its course, its history, its laws. 

 We want to know its various typical forms; how 

 each originates; how it is related to others; the 



