ction, we cannot discover
exactly _what_ the mind is. No one knows what electricity is, though
nearly everyone uses it in one form or another. We study the dynamo, the
motor, and the conductors through which electricity manifests itself. We
observe its effects in light, heat, and mechanical power, and so learn
the laws which govern its operations. But we are almost as far from
understanding its true nature as were the ancients who knew nothing of
its uses. The dynamo does not create the electricity, but only furnishes
the conditions which make it possible for electricity to manifest
itself in doing the world's work. Likewise the brain or nervous system
does not create the mind, but it furnishes the machine through which the
mind works. We may study the nervous system and learn something of the
conditions and limitations under which the mind operates, but this is
not studying the mind itself. As in the case of electricity, what we
know about the mind we must learn through the activities in which it
manifests itself--these we can know, 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.