When I try centering my table & getting a caption so that it reads something like "Table 1. This is the caption." the table appears at the top of the page no matter what I do. If I don't do the caption then I can get it in the part of the document that I want. How do I fix this problem?

\begin{table}
    \caption{This is the caption.}
    \begin{center}
        \begin{tabular}{ | l | l | l | l |}
        \hline

        ...

        \hline
        \end{tabular}
    \end{center}
\end{table}