menu_book Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI. THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY. BRETHREN OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION. In casting about me for a subject for your President this year to talk about, it has seemed to me that our experiences of activity would form a good one, not only because the topic is so naturally interesting, and because it has lately led to a good deal of rather

inconclusive discussion, but because I myself am growing more and more interested in a certain systematic way of handling questions, and want to get others interested also. And this question strikes me as one in which, although I am painfully aware of my inability to communicate new discoveries or reach definitive conclusions, I can yet show, in a rather definite manner, how the method works. The way of handling things I speak of is, as you will already have suspected,

that known sometimes as the pragmatic method, sometimes as humanism, sometimes as deweyism, and in France, by the disciples of Bergson, as the philosophie nouvelle. Professor Woodbridge's Journal of Philosophy seems unintentionally to have become a sort of meeting-place for those who follow these tendencies in America. There is only a dim identity among them, and the most that can be said at present is that some sort of gestation seems to be in the atmosphere,

and that almost any day a man with a genius for finding the right word for things may hit upon some unifying and conciliating formula that will make so much vaguely similar aspiration crystallize into more definite form. I myself have given the name radical empiricism to that version of the tendency in question which I prefer, and I propose, if you will now let me, to illustrate what I mean by radical empiricism, by applying it to activity as an example,

hoping at the same time, incidentally, to leave the general problem of activity in a slightly, I fear very slightly, more manageable shape than before. Mr. Bradley calls the question of activity a scandal to philosophy, and if one turns to the current literature of the subject, his own writings included, one easily gathers what he means. The opponents cannot even understand one another. Mr. Bradley says to Mr. Ward, I do not care what your oracle is, and your

preposterous psychology may here be gospel if you please, but if the revelation does contain a meaning, I will commit myself to this. Either the oracle is so confused that its signification is not discoverable, or, upon the other hand, if it can be pinned down to any definite statement, then that statement will be false." Mr. Ward, in turn, says of Mr. Bradley, I cannot even imagine the state of mind to which his description applies.

It reads like an unintentional travesty of Herbartian psychology by one who has tried to improve upon it without being at the pains to master it. Muensterberg excludes a view opposed to his own by saying that with anyone who holds it a verstandigung with him is Grundsaslich August Lawson, and Reuss, in a review of Stout,

hauls him over the coals at great length for defending efficacy, in a way which I, for one, never gathered from reading him, and which i have heard stout himself say was quite foreign to the intention of his text in these discussions distinct questions are habitually jumbled and different points of view are talked of durchanander one there is a psychological question have we perceptions of activity and if so what are they like and when and where do we have them two there is a metaphysical question is there a fact of activity and if so what idea must we frame of it what is it like and what does it do if it does anything and finally there is a logical question three whence do we know activity by our own feelings of it solely or by some other source of information

Throughout page after page of the literature one knows not which of these questions is before one, and mere description of the surface show of experience is proffered as if it implicitly answered every one of them. No one of the disputants, moreover, tries to show what pragmatic consequences his own view would carry, or what assignable particular differences in any one's experience it would make if his adversaries were triumphant. It seems to me that if radical empiricism be good for anything, it ought, with its pragmatic method and its principle of pure experience, to be able to avoid such tangles, or at least to simplify them somewhat.

The pragmatic method starts from the postulate that there is no difference of truth that doesn't make a difference of fact somewhere, and it seeks to determine the meaning of all differences of opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon as possible upon some practical or particular issue. The principle of pure experience is also a methodical postulate.

Nothing shall be admitted as fact, it says, except what can be experienced at some definite time by some experience, and for every feature of fact ever so experienced, a definite place must be found somewhere in the final system of reality. In other words, everything real must be experienceable somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real.

Armed with these rules of method, let us see what face the problems of activity present to us. By the principle of pure experience, either the word activity must have no meaning at all, or else the original type and model of what it means must lie in some concrete kind of experience that can be definitely pointed out.

Whatever ulterior judgments we may eventually come to make regarding activity, that sort of thing will be what the judgments are about. The first step to take, then, is to ask where in the stream of experience we seem to find what we speak of as activity. What we are to think of the activity thus found will be a later question.

Now, it is obvious that we are tempted to affirm activity wherever we find anything going on. Taken in the broadest sense, any apprehension of something doing is an experience of activity. Where our world describable only by the words, nothing happening, nothing changing, nothing doing, we should unquestionably call it an inactive world. Bare activity, then, as we

may call it, means the bare fact of event or change. Change taking place is a unique content of experience, one of those conjunctive objects which radical empiricism seeks so earnestly to rehabilitate and preserve. The sense of activity is thus, in the broadest and vaguest way, synonymous with the sense of life. We should feel our own subjective life at least, even in noticing and proclaiming an otherwise inactive world. Our own reaction

on its monotony would be the one thing experienced there in the form of something coming to pass. This seems to be what certain writers have in mind when they insist that, for an experience, to be at all is to be active. It seems to justify, or at any rate to explain Mr. Warren's expression, that we are only as we are active, for we are only as experience, and it rules out Mr. Bradley's contention that, quote, there is no original experience of anything like activity, end quote.

What we ought to say about activities thus elementary, whose they are, what they affect, or indeed whether they affect anything at all, these are later questions, to be answered only when the field of experience is enlarged. Bare activity would thus be predictable, though there were no definite direction no actor and no aim mere restless zigzag movement or a wild eidenfluch der rhapsody der warnemungen as kant would say would constitute an active as distinguished from an inactive world But, in this actual world of ours, as it is given, a part at least of the activity comes with definite direction. It comes with desire and sense of goal. It comes complicated with resistances which it overcomes or succumbs to, and with the efforts which the feeling of resistance so often provokes.

and it is in complex experiences like these that the notions of distinct agents, and of passivity as opposed to activity, arise. Here also the notion of causal efficacy comes to birth. Perhaps the most elaborate work ever done in descriptive psychology has been the analysis by various recent writers of the more complex activity situations. In their descriptions, exquisitely subtle some of them, the activity appears as the gestalt qualitat, or the funder tin halt, or whatever else you may please to call the conjunctive form, which the content falls into when we experience it in the ways which the describers set forth. Those factors in those relations are what we mean by activity situations, and to the

possible enumeration and accumulation of their circumstances and ingredients there would seem to be no natural bound. Every hour of human life could contribute to the picture gallery, and this is the only fault that one can find with such descriptive industry. Where is it going to stop?

Ought we to listen forever to verbal pictures of what we have already in concrete form in our own breasts? They never take us off the superficial plane. We know the facts already, less spread out and separated to be sure, but we know them still. We always felt our own activity, for example, as, quote, the expansion of an idea with which our self is identified against

an obstacle, and the following out of such a definition, through a multitude of cases, elaborates the obvious, so as to be little more than an exercise in synonymic speech. All the descriptions have to trace familiar outlines, and to use familiar terms. The activity is, for example, attributed either to a physical or to a mental agent, and is either aimless or directed.

If directed, it shows tendency. The tendency may or may not be resisted. If not, we call the activity imminent, as when a body moves in empty space by its momentum, or our thoughts wander at their own sweet will. If resistance is met, its agent complicates the situation.

If now, in spite of resistance, the original tendency continues, effort makes its appearance, and along with effort, strain or squeeze. Will, in the narrower sense of the word, then comes upon the scene, whenever, along with the tendency, the strain and squeeze are sustained. But the resistance may be great enough to check the tendency, or even to reverse its

path. In that case, we, if we were the original agents or subjects of the tendency, are overpowered. The phenomenon turns into one of tension simply, or of necessity succumbed to, according as the opposing power is only equal or is superior to ourselves. Whoever describes an experience in such terms as these, describes an experience of activity. If the word have any meaning, it must denote what there is found.

There is complete activity in its original and first intention. What is known as, is what there appears. The experiencer of such a situation possesses all that the idea contains. He feels the tendency, the obstacle, the will, the strain, the triumph, or the passive giving up, just as he feels the time, the space, the swiftness or intensity, the movement, the weight and color, the pain and

pleasure, the complexity, or whatever remaining characters the situation may involve. He goes through all that can ever be imagined where activity is supposed. If we suppose activities to go on outside of our experience, it is in forms like these that we must suppose them, or else give them some other name, for the word activity has no imaginable content whatever, save these experiences of process, obstruction, striving, strain or release, ultimate qualia

as they are of the life given us to be known. Were this the end of the matter, one might think that whenever we had successfully lived through an activity situation we should have to be permitted, without provoking contradiction, to say that we had been really active, that we had met real resistance, and had really prepared. Lotz says somewhere that, to be an entity, all that is necessary is to gelten as an entity, to operate, or be felt, experienced, recognized,

or in any way realized as such. In our activity experiences, the activity assuredly fulfills lots's demand. It makes itself gelten. It is witnessed at its work. No matter what activities there may really be in this extraordinary universe of ours, it is impossible for us to conceive of any one of them being either lived through or authentically known otherwise than in this dramatic shape of something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles and overcoming

or being overcome. What sustaining means here is clear to any one who has lived through the experience, but to no one else, just as loud, red, sweet means something only to beings with ears, eyes, and tongues. The Persepi in these originals of experience is the essay. The curtain is the picture. If there is anything hiding in the background, it ought not to be called activity, but should get itself another name. This seems so obviously true that one might well experience

astonishment at finding so many of the ablest writers on the subject flatly denying that the activity we live through in these situations is real. Merely to feel active is not to be active, in their sight. The agents that appear in the experience are not real agents. The resistances do not really resist. The effects that appear are not really effects at all. Footnote. Verborum gratia. The feeling of activity is not able, qua feeling, to tell us anything

about activity. Love Day, Mind and Nest, Volume X, 1190.11, page 463. A sensation or feeling of activity is not looked at in another way, an experience of activity at all. It is a mere sensation, shut up, within which you could by no reflection get the idea of

activity. Whether this experience is or is not later on a character essential to our perception and our idea of activity, it, as it comes first, is not in itself an experience of our activity at all. it as it comes first is only so for extraneous reasons and only so for an outside observer bradley appearance in reality second edition page six or five in dem tautig scheitzgefühle liegt an sich nicht der gerendste beweis für das vorhanden sein einer psychischen

i could multiply similar quotations and would have introduced some of them into my text to make it more concrete save that the mingling of different points of view in most of these authors discussions not in munsterberg's make it impossible to disentangle exactly what they mean i am sure in any case to be accused of misrepresenting them totally even in this note by omission of the context so the less i name names and the more i stick to abstract characterization of a merely possible style of opinion the safer it will be and apropos of misunderstandings i may add to this note a complaint on my own account professor stout in the excellent chapter on mental activity in volume one of his analytic psychology takes me to task for identifying spiritual activity with certain muscular feelings and gives quotations to bear him out they are from certain paragraphs on the self in which my attempt was to show what the central nucleus of the activities that we call ours is in principles of psychology vol i p p i found it in certain intracephalic movements which we habitually oppose as subjective to the activities of the transcorporeal world i sought to show that there is no direct evidence that we feel the activity of an inner spiritual agent as such

i should now say the activity of i-consciousness as such see the first essay does consciousness exist there are in fact three distinguishable activities in the field of discussion the elementary activity involved in the mere that of experience in the fact that something is going on and the further specification of this something into two whats an activity felt is ours and an activity ascribed to objects stout as i apprehend him identifies our activity with that of the total experience process and when I circumscribe it as a part thereof, accuses me of treating it as a sort of external appendage to itself, as if I separated the activity from the process which is active. But all the processes in question are active, and their activity is inseparable from their being.

My book raised only the question of which activity deserved the name of ours. So far as we are persons, and contrasted and opposed to an environment, movement, movements in our bodies figure as our activities, and I am unable to find any other activities that are ours in this strictly personal sense. There is a wider sense in which the whole choir of heaven and furniture of the earth and their activities are ours,

for they are our objects. But we are here only another name for the total process of experience, another name for all that is, in fact, and I was dealing with the personal and individualized self exclusively in the passages with which Professor Stout finds fault. The individualized self, which I believe to be the only thing properly called self, is a part of the content of the world experienced. The world experienced, otherwise called the field

of consciousness, comes at all times with our body as its center, center of vision, center of action, center of interest. Where the body is, is here. When the body acts, is now. What the body touches, is this, all other things are there and then and that. These words of emphasized position imply a systematization of things with reference to a focus of action and interest which lies in the body, and the systematization is now so instinctive, was it ever not so, that no developed or active

experience exists for us at all except in that ordered form. So far as thoughts and feelings can be active. Their activity terminates in the activity of the body, and only through first arousing its activities can they begin to change those of the rest of the world. The body is the storm center, the origin of coordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience train. Everything circles around it and is felt from its point of view.

The word I, then, is primarily a noun of position, just like this and here. Activities attached to I this position must have prerogative emphasis, and if activities have feelings, must be felt in a peculiar way. The word my designates the kind of emphasis. I see no inconsistency whatever in defending on the one hand my activities as unique and opposed to those of outer nature, and on the other hand in affirming after introspection that they consist in movements

in the head. The my of them is the emphasis, the feeling of prospective interest in which they are died. End footnote. It is evident from this that mere descriptive analysis of any one of our activity experiences is not the whole story, that there is something still to tell about them that has led such

able writers to conceive of a Simon-pure activity, of an activity, and seek, that does, and doesn't merely appear to us to do so, and compared with whose real doing all this phenomenal activity is but a specious sham. The metaphysical question opens here, and I think that the state of mind of one possessed by it is often something like this. It is all very well, we may imagine him saying, to talk about certain experience series taking on the form of feelings of activity,

just as they might take on musical or geometric forms. Suppose that they do so. Suppose that we feel a will to stand a strain. Does our feeling do more than record the fact that the strain is sustained? The real activity, meanwhile, is the doing of the fact, and what is the doing made of before the record is made? What in the will enables it to act thus?

And these trains of experience themselves, in which activities appear, what makes them go at all? Does the activity in one bit of experience bring the next bit into being? As an empiricist you cannot say so, for you have just declared activity to be only a kind of synthetic object, or a conjunctive relation experienced between bits of experience already made. but what made them at all what propels experience überhaupt into being there is the activity that operates the activity felt is only its superficial sign

To the metaphysical question popped upon us in this way, I must pay serious attention ere I end my remarks. But before doing so, let me show that without leaving the immediate reticulations of experience, or asking what makes activity itself act, we still find the distinction between less real and more real activities forced upon us, and are driven to much soul-searching on the purely phenomenal plane. We must not forget namely, in talking

of the ultimate character of our activity experiences, that each of them is but a portion of a wider world, one link in the vast chain of processes of experience out of which history is made. Each partial process, to him who lives through it, defines itself by its origin and its goal. But to an observer with a wider mind-span who should live outside of it, that goal would appear but as a provisional halting-place, and the subjectively felt activity would be

seen to continue into objective activities that led far beyond. We thus acquire a habit in discussing activity experiences, of defining them by their relation to something more. If an experience be one of narrow span, it will be mistaken as to what activity it is and whose. You think that you are acting while you are only obeying someone's push. You think you are doing this, but you are doing something of which you do not dream. For instance,

You think you are but drinking this glass, but you are really creating the liver cirrhosis that will end your days. You think you are just driving this bargain, but, as Stevenson says somewhere, you are laying down a link in the policy of mankind. Generally speaking, the onlooker, with his wider field of vision, regards the ultimate outcome of an activity as what it is more really doing,

and the most previous agent ascertainable being the first source of action, he regards as the most real agent in the field. The others but transmit that agent's impulse. On him we put responsibility. We name him when one asks us,

Who's to blame? But the most previous agents ascertainable, instead of being of longer span, are often of much shorter span than the activity in view.

Brain cells are a best example. My brain cells are believed to excite each other from next to next by contiguous transmission of catabolic alteration, let us say, and to have been doing so long before

this present stretch of lecturing activity on my part began, if any one cell group stops its activity the lecturing will cease or show disorder of form cesante causa cessate defectus does this not look as if the short-span brain activities were the more real activities and the lecturing activities on my part only their effects Moreover, as Hume so clearly pointed out, in my mental activity situation, the words physically to be uttered are represented as the activity's immediate goal. These words, however, cannot be

uttered without intermediate physical processes in the bulb and vagi nerves, which processes nevertheless fail to figure in the mental activity series at all. That series, therefore, since it leaves out vitally real steps of action, cannot represent the real activities. It is something purely subjective, the facts of activity are elsewhere. They are something far more interstitial, so to speak, than what my feelings record. The real facts of activity, that have in point of

fact been systematically pleaded for by philosophers, have, so far as my information goes, been of three principal types. The first type takes a consciousness of wider time-span than ours to be the vehicle of the more real activity. Its will is the agent, and its purpose is the action done. The second type assumes that ideas struggling with one another are the agents, and that the prevalence of one set of them is the action. The third type believes

that nerve cells are the agents, and that the resultant motor discharges are the acts achieved. Now, if we must derealize our immediately felt activity situations for the benefit of either of these types of substitute, we ought to know what the substitution practically involves. What practical difference ought it to make if, instead of saying naively that I am active now in delivering this address, I say that a wider thinker is active, or that certain

ideas are active, or that certain nerve cells are active in producing the result? This would be the pragmatic meaning of the three hypotheses. Let us take them in succession in seeking a reply. If we assume a wider thinker, it is evident that his purposes envelop mine. I am really lecturing for him, and although I cannot surely know to what end, yet if I take him religiously, I can trust it to be a good end, and willingly connive.

I can be happy in thinking that my activity transmits his impulse, and that his end prolongs my own. So long as I take him religiously, in short, he does not derealize my activities. He tends rather to corroborate the reality of them, so long as I believe both them and him to be good. When we now turn to ideas, the case is different, inasmuch as ideas are supposed by the association psychology to influence each other only from next to next. The span of an idea or pair of ideas is assumed to be much smaller instead of being larger than that of my total conscious field.

The same results may get worked out in both cases, for this address is being given anyhow. But the ideas supposed to really work it out had no provision of the whole of it. and if I was lecturing for an absolute thinker in the former case, so by similar reasoning are my ideas now lecturing for me, that is, accomplishing unwittingly a result which I approve and adopt. But when this passing lecture is over, there is nothing in the bare notion that ideas have been

its agents that would seem to guarantee that my present purposes in lecturing will be prolonged. I may have ulterior developments in view, but there is no certainty that my ideas as such will wish to or be able to work them out. The like is true if nerve cells be the agents. The activity of a nerve cell must be conceived of as a tendency of exceedingly short reach, an impulse barely spanning the way to the next cell, for surely that amount of actual process must be experienced

by the cells if what happens between them is to deserve the name of activity at all. But here again the gross resultant, as I perceive it, is indifferent to the agents, and neither wished, nor willed, nor foreseen. There being agents now congruous with my will gives me no guarantee that like results will recur again from their activity. In point of fact, all sorts of other results do occur. My mistakes, impotencies, perversions, mental obstructions,

and frustrations, generally, are also results of the activity of cells. Although these are letting me lecture now, on other occasions they make me do things that I would willingly not do. The question, whose is the real activity, is thus tantamount to the question, what will be the actual results. Its interest is dramatic. How will things work out? If the agents are of one sort one way, if of another sort they may work out very differently. The pragmatic meaning of the various

alternatives, in short, is great. It makes no merely verbal difference which opinion we take up. You see it as the old dispute come back—materialism and teleology, elementary short-span actions summing themselves blindly, or facts foreseen ideals coming with effort into act. Naively we believe, and humanly and dramatically we like to believe, that activities both of wider and of narrower span are at work in life together, that both are real, and that the

long-span tendencies yoke the others in their service, encouraging them in the right direction, and damping them when they tend in other ways. But how to represent clearly the modus operandi of such steering of small tendencies by large ones is a problem which metaphysical thinkers will have to ruminate upon for many years to come. Even if such control should eventually grow clearly picturable, the question how far it is successfully exerted in this actual

world can be answered only by investigating the details of fact. No philosophic knowledge of the general nature and constitution of tendencies, or of the relation of larger to smaller ones, can help us to predict which of all the various competing tendencies that interest us in this universe are likeliest to prevail. We know as an empirical fact that far-seeing tendencies often carry out their purpose, but we know also that they are often

defeated by the failure of some contemptibly small process on which success depends. A little thrombus in a statesman's meningeal artery will throw an empire out of gear. I can therefore not even hint at any solution of the pragmatic issue. I have only wished to show you that the issue is what gives the real interest to all inquiries into what kinds of activity may be real. Are the forces that really act in the world more foreseeing or more blind? As between our activities

as we experience them, and those of our ideas, or of our brain cells, the issue is well defined. I said a while back that I should return to the metaphysical question before ending, so with a few words about that I will now close my remarks. In whatever form we hear this question propound it, I think that it always arises from two things—a belief that causality must be exerted in activity, and a wonder as to how causality is made.

If we take an activity situation at its face value, it seems as if we caught it in flagrante delicto, the very power that makes facts come and be. I am now eagerly striving, for example, to get this truth which I seem half to perceive into words which shall make it show more clearly. If the words come, it will seem as if the striving itself had drawn or pulled them into actuality out of the state of merely possible being in which they were. How is this feat performed? How does the pulling pull?

How do I get my hold on words not yet existent, and when they come, by what means have I made them come? Really it is the problem of creation, for in the end is, how do I make them be? Real activities are those that really make things be, without which the things are not, and with which they are there. activity so far as we merely feel it on the other hand is only an impression of ours it may be maintained and an impression is for all this way of thinking only a shadow of another fact arrived at this point i can do little more than indicate the principles on which as it seems to me a radically empirical philosophy is obliged to rely in handling such a dispute

if there be real creative activities in being radical empiricism must say somewhere they must be immediately lived somewhere the that of efficacious causing and the what of it must be experienced in one just as the what and that of cold are experienced in one whenever a man has the sensation of cold here and now It boots not to say that our sensations are fallible. They are indeed. But to see the thermometer contradict us when we say it is cold, does not abolish cold as a specific nature from the universe. Cold is in the Arctic Circle, if not here. Even so, to feel that our train is moving when the train beside our window moves, to see the moon through a telescope twice as near, or to see two pictures as one solid when we look through a stereoscope at them,

leaves motion, nearness, and solidity still in being, if not here, yet each in its proper seat elsewhere. And wherever the seat of real causality is, as ultimately known for true in nerve processes, if you will, that cause our feelings of activity, as well as the movements which these seem to prompt,

A philosophy of pure experience can consider the real causation as no other nature of thing than that which even in our most erroneous experiences appears to be at work. Exactly what appears there is what we mean by working, though we may later come to learn that working was not exactly there. Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying with effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving our intention, this is action, this is effectuation

in the only shape in which, by a pure experience philosophy, the whereabouts of it anywhere can be discussed. Here is creation in its first intention. Here is causality at work. Footnote. Let me not be told that this contradicts the first essay, Does Consciousness Exist? See especially page 32, in which it was said that while thoughts and things have the same natures, the natures work energetically on each other in the things—fire burns, water wets, etc.,

but not in the thoughts. Mental activity trains are composed of thoughts, yet their members do work on each other. They check, sustain, and introduce. They do so when the activity is merely associational, as well as when effort is there. But, and this is my reply, they do so by other parts of their nature than those that energize physically. One thought in every developed activity series is a desire or thought of purpose, and all the other thoughts acquire a

feeling tone from their relation of harmony or appugnancy to this. The interplay of these secondary tones, among which interest, difficulty, and effort figure, runs the drama in the mental series. In what we term the physical drama, these qualities play absolutely no part. The subject needs careful working out, but I can see no inconsistency. To treat this offhand as the bare illusory surface of a world whose real causality is an unimaginable ontological principle hidden

in the cubic deeps is, for the more empirical way of thinking, only animism in another shape. You explain your given fact by your principle, but the principle itself, when you look clearly at it, turns out to be nothing but a previous little spiritual copy of the fact. Away from that, one and only kind of fact, your mind, considering causality, can never get. I have found myself more than once accused in print of being the asserter of a metaphysical

principle of activity. Since literary misunderstandings retard the settlement of problems, I should like to say that such an interpretation of the pages I have published on effort and on will is absolutely foreign to what I meant to express. I owe all my doctrines on this subject to Renovier, and Renovier, as I understand him, is, or at any rate then was, an out-and-out phenomenist, a denier of forces in the most strenuous sense.

Single clauses in my writing, or sentences read out of their connection, may possibly have been compatible with a transphenomenal principle of energy, but I defy any one to show a single sentence which, taken with its context, should be naturally held to advocate that view. The misinterpretation probably arose at first from my defending, after Renuvier, the indeterminism

of our efforts. Free will was supposed by my critics to involve a supernatural agent. As a matter of plain history, the only free will I ever thought of offending is the character of novelty in fresh activity situations. If an activity process is the form of the whole field of consciousness,

and if each field of consciousness is not only in its totality unique, as is now commonly admitted, but has its elements unique, since in that situation they are all dyed in the total, then novelty is perpetually entering the world, and what happens there is not pure repetition, as the dogma of the literal uniformity of nature requires. Activity situations come, in short,

each with an original touch. A principle of free will, if there were one, would doubtless manifest itself in such phenomena, but I never saw, nor do I now see, what the principle could do, except rehearse the phenomenon beforehand, or why it should ever be invoked. I conclude, then, that real effectual causation as an ultimate nature, as a category, if you like, of reality, is just what we feel it to be, just that kind of conjunction which our own activity series reveal.

We have the whole but and being of it in our hands, and the healthy thing for philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground for what effects effectuation, or what makes action act, and try to solve the concrete questions of where effectuation in this world is located, of which things are true causal agents there, and of what the more remote effects consist. From this point of view, the greater sublimity traditionally attributed to the metaphysical

inquiry, the grubbing inquiry, entirely disappears. If we could know what causation really and transcendentally is in itself, the only use of the knowledge would be to help us recognize an actual cause when we had one, and so to track the future course of operations more intelligently out. The mere abstract inquiry into causation's hidden nature is not more sublime than any other inquiry equally abstract. Causation inhabits no more sublime level than anything else.

It lives apparently in the dirt of the world as well as in the absolute, or in man's unconquerable mind. The worth and interest of the world consists not in its elements, be these elements things, or be they in the conjunctions of things. It exists rather in the dramatic outcome in the whole process, and in the meaning of the succession stages which the elements work out. My colleague and master, Josiah Royce, in a page of his review of Stout's Analytic Psychology,

has some fine words on this point, with which I cordially agree. I cannot agree with his separating the notion of efficacy from that of activity altogether. This, I understand, to be one contention of his, for activities are efficacious whenever they are real activities at all. But the inner nature, both of efficacy and of activity, are superficial problems, I understand Royce to say. And the only point for us in solving them would be their possible

use in helping us to solve the far deeper problem of the course and meaning of the world of life. Life, says our colleague, is full of significance, of meaning, of success and defeat, of hoping and striving, of longing and desire and inner value. It is a total presence that embodies worth. To live our own lives better in this presence is the true reason why we wish to know the elements of things, so even we psychologists must end

on this pragmatic note. The urgent problems of activity are thus more concrete. They are all problems of the true relation of longer span to shorter span activities. When, for example, a number of ideas, to use the name traditional in psychology, grow confluent in a larger field of consciousness, do the smaller activities still coexist with the wider activities then experienced by the conscious subject? And if so, do the wide activities

accompany the narrow ones inertly? Or do they exert control? Or do they perhaps utterly supplant and replace them, and short-circuit their effects? Again, when a mental activity process and a brain-cell series of activities both terminate in the same muscular movement, does the mental process steal the neural processes or not? Or, on the other hand, does it independently short-circuit their effects. Such are the questions that we must begin with.

But so far am I from suggesting any definitive answer to such questions, that I hardly yet can put them clearly. They lead, however, into that region of panpsychic and ontologic speculation, of which professors Bergson and Strong have lately enlarged the literature in so able and interesting a way. The results of these authors seem in many respects dissimilar, and I understand them as yet imperfectly, but I cannot help suspecting that the direction of their work

is very promising, and that they have the hunter's instinct for the fruitful trails.