FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[68][Reprinted fromThe Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.ii, No. 7, March 30, 1905.][69]“A World of Pure Experience,” above, pp.39-91.[70][For an explanation of this expression, see above, p.32.][71]I call them ‘passing thoughts’ in the book—the passage in point goes from pages 330 to 342 of vol.i.[72]Shadworth Hodgson has laid great stress on the fact that the minimum of consciousness demands two subfeelings, of which the second retrospects the first. (Cf. the section ‘Analysis of Minima’ in hisPhilosophy of Reflection, vol.i, p. 248; also the chapter entitled ‘The Moment of Experience’ in hisMetaphysic of Experience, vol.i, p. 34.) ‘We live forward, but we understand backward’ is a phrase of Kierkegaard’s which Höffding quotes. [H. Höffding: “A Philosophical Confession,”Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.ii, 1905, p. 86.][73][Cf. below, pp.197,202.][74][Cf.A Pluralistic Universe, Lect.iv, ‘Concerning Fechner,’ and Lect.v, ‘The Compounding of Consciousness.’]

[68][Reprinted fromThe Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.ii, No. 7, March 30, 1905.]

[69]“A World of Pure Experience,” above, pp.39-91.

[70][For an explanation of this expression, see above, p.32.]

[71]I call them ‘passing thoughts’ in the book—the passage in point goes from pages 330 to 342 of vol.i.

[72]Shadworth Hodgson has laid great stress on the fact that the minimum of consciousness demands two subfeelings, of which the second retrospects the first. (Cf. the section ‘Analysis of Minima’ in hisPhilosophy of Reflection, vol.i, p. 248; also the chapter entitled ‘The Moment of Experience’ in hisMetaphysic of Experience, vol.i, p. 34.) ‘We live forward, but we understand backward’ is a phrase of Kierkegaard’s which Höffding quotes. [H. Höffding: “A Philosophical Confession,”Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.ii, 1905, p. 86.]

[73][Cf. below, pp.197,202.]

[74][Cf.A Pluralistic Universe, Lect.iv, ‘Concerning Fechner,’ and Lect.v, ‘The Compounding of Consciousness.’]

Common sense and popular philosophy are as dualistic as it is possible to be. Thoughts, we all naturally think, are made of one kind of substance, and things of another. Consciousness, flowing inside of us in the forms of conception or judgment, or concentrating itself in the shape of passion or emotion, can be directly felt as the spiritual activity which it is, and known in contrast with the space-filling objective ‘content’ which it envelopes and accompanies. In opposition to this dualistic philosophy, I tried, in [the first essay] to show that thoughts and things are absolutely homogeneous as to their material, and that their opposition is only one of relation and of function. There is no thought-stuff different from thing-stuff, I said; but the same identical pieceof ‘pure experience’ (which was the name I gave to themateria primaof everything) can stand alternately for a ‘fact of consciousness’ or for a physical reality, according as it is taken in one context or in another. For the right understanding of what follows, I shall have to presuppose that the reader will have read that [essay].[76]

The commonest objection which the doctrine there laid down runs up against is drawn from the existence of our ‘affections.’ In our pleasures and pains, our loves and fears and angers, in the beauty, comicality, importance or preciousness of certain objects and situations, we have, I am told by many critics, a great realm of experience intuitively recognized as spiritual, made, and felt to be made, of consciousness exclusively, and different in nature from the space-filling kind of being which is enjoyed by physical objects. In Section VII. of [the first essay], I treated of this class of experiences very inadequately,because I had to be so brief. I now return to the subject, because I believe that, so far from invalidating my general thesis, these phenomena, when properly analyzed, afford it powerful support.

The central point of the pure-experience theory is that ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ are names for two groups into which we sort experiences according to the way in which they act upon their neighbors. Any one ‘content,’ such ashard, let us say, can be assigned to either group. In the outer group it is ‘strong,’ it acts ‘energetically’ and aggressively. Here whatever is hard interferes with the space its neighbors occupy. It dents them; is impenetrable by them; and we call the hardness then a physical hardness. In the mind, on the contrary, the hard thing is nowhere in particular, it dents nothing, it suffuses through its mental neighbors, as it were, and interpenetrates them. Taken in this group we call both it and them ‘ideas’ or ‘sensations’; and the basis of the two groups respectively is the different type of interrelation, the mutual impenetrability,on the one hand, and the lack of physical interference and interaction, on the other.

That what in itself is one and the same entity should be able to function thus differently in different contexts is a natural consequence of the extremely complex reticulations in which our experiences come. To her offspring a tigress is tender, but cruel to every other living thing—both cruel and tender, therefore, at once. A mass in movement resists every force that operates contrariwise to its own direction, but to forces that pursue the same direction, or come in at right angles, it is absolutely inert. It is thus both energetic and inert; and the same is true (if you vary the associates properly) of every other piece of experience. It is only towards certain specific groups of associates that the physical energies, as we call them, of a content are put forth. In another group it may be quite inert.

It is possible to imagine a universe of experiences in which the only alternative between neighbors would be either physical interaction or complete inertness. In such a world themental or the physicalstatusof any piece of experience would be unequivocal. When active, it would figure in the physical, and when inactive, in the mental group.

But the universe we live in is more chaotic than this, and there is room in it for the hybrid or ambiguous group of our affectional experiences, of our emotions and appreciative perceptions. In the paragraphs that follow I shall try to show:

(1) That the popular notion that these experiences are intuitively given as purely inner facts is hasty and erroneous; and

(2) That their ambiguity illustrates beautifully my central thesis that subjectivity and objectivity are affairs not of what an experience is aboriginally made of, but of its classification. Classifications depend on our temporary purposes. For certain purposes it is convenient to take things in one set of relations, for other purposes in another set. In the two cases their contexts are apt to be different. In the case of our affectional experiences we have no permanent and steadfast purpose thatobliges us to be consistent, so we find it easy to let them float ambiguously, sometimes classing them with our feelings, sometimes with more physical realities, according to caprice or to the convenience of the moment. Thus would these experiences, so far from being an obstacle to the pure experience philosophy, serve as an excellent corroboration of its truth.

First of all, then, it is a mistake to say, with the objectors whom I began by citing, that anger, love and fear are affections purely of the mind. That, to a great extent at any rate, they are simultaneously affections of the body is proved by the whole literature of the James-Lange theory of emotion.[77]All our pains, moreover, are local, and we are always free to speak of them in objective as well as in subjective terms. We can say that we are aware of a painful place, filling a certain bigness in our organism, or we can say that we are inwardly in a ‘state’ of pain. All our adjectives ofworth are similarly ambiguous—I instanced some of the ambiguities [in the first essay].[78]Is the preciousness of a diamond a quality of the gem? or is it a feeling in our mind? Practically we treat it as both or as either, according to the temporary direction of our thought. ‘Beauty,’ says Professor Santayana, ‘is pleasure objectified’; and in Sections 10 and 11 of his work,The Sense of Beauty, he treats in a masterly way of this equivocal realm. The various pleasures we receive from an object may count as ‘feelings’ when we take them singly, but when they combine in a total richness, we call the result the ‘beauty’ of the object, and treat it as an outer attribute which our mind perceives. We discover beauty just as we discover the physical properties of things. Training is needed to make us expert in either line. Single sensations also may be ambiguous. Shall we say an ‘agreeable degree of heat,’ or an ‘agreeable feeling’ occasioned by the degree of heat? Either will do; and language would lose most of its esthetic and rhetorical valuewere we forbidden to project words primarily connoting our affections upon the objects by which the affections are aroused. The man is really hateful; the action really mean; the situation really tragic—all in themselves and quite apart from our opinion. We even go so far as to talk of a weary road, a giddy height, a jocund morning or a sullen sky; and the term ‘indefinite’ while usually applied only to our apprehensions, functions as a fundamental physical qualification of things in Spencer’s ‘law of evolution,’ and doubtless passes with most readers for all right.

Psychologists, studying our perceptions of movement, have unearthed experiences in which movement is felt in general but not ascribed correctly to the body that really moves. Thus in optical vertigo, caused by unconscious movements of our eyes, both we and the external universe appear to be in a whirl. When clouds float by the moon, it is as if both clouds and moon and we ourselves shared in the motion. In the extraordinary case of amnesia of the Rev. Mr. Hanna, published by Sidis and Goodhart in their important work onMultiple Personality, we read that when the patient first recovered consciousness and “noticed an attendant walk across the room, he identified the movement with that of his own. He did not yet discriminate between his own movements and those outside himself.”[79]Such experiences point to a primitive stage of perception in which discriminations afterwards needful have not yet been made. A piece of experience of a determinate sort is there, but there at first as a ‘pure’ fact. Motion originally simplyis; only later is it confined to this thing or to that. Something like this is true of every experience, however complex, at the moment of its actual presence. Let the reader arrest himself in the act of reading this article now.Nowthis is a pure experience, a phenomenon, or datum, a merethator content of fact.‘Reading’ simply is, is there; and whether there for some one’s consciousness, or there for physical nature, is a question not yet put. At the moment, it is there forneither; later we shall probably judge it to have been there for both.

With the affectional experiences which we are considering, the relatively ‘pure’ condition lasts. In practical life no urgent need has yet arisen for deciding whether to treat them as rigorously mental or as rigorously physical facts. So they remain equivocal; and, as the world goes, their equivocality is one of their great conveniences.

The shifting place of ‘secondary qualities’ in the history of philosophy[80]is another excellent proof of the fact that ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ are not coefficients with which experiences come to us aboriginally stamped, but are rather results of a later classification performed by us for particular needs. The common-sense stage of thought is a perfectly definite practical halting-place, the place where we ourselves can proceed to act unhesitatingly. On this stage of thought things act on each other as well as on us by means of their secondaryqualities. Sound, as such, goes through the air and can be intercepted. The heat of the fire passes over, as such, into the water which it sets a-boiling. It is the very light of the arc-lamp which displaces the darkness of the midnight street, etc. By engendering and translocating just these qualities, actively efficacious as they seem to be, we ourselves succeed in altering nature so as to suit us; and until more purely intellectual, as distinguished from practical, needs had arisen, no one ever thought of calling these qualities subjective. When, however, Galileo, Descartes, and others found it best for philosophic purposes to class sound, heat, and light along with pain and pleasure as purely mental phenomena, they could do so with impunity.[81]

Even the primary qualities are undergoing the same fate. Hardness and softness are effects on us of atomic interactions, and the atoms themselves are neither hard nor soft, nor solid nor liquid. Size and shape are deemedsubjective by Kantians; time itself is subjective according to many philosophers;[82]and even the activity and causal efficacy which lingered in physics long after secondary qualities were banished are now treated as illusory projections outwards of phenomena of our own consciousness. There are no activities or effects in nature, for the most intellectual contemporary school of physical speculation. Nature exhibits onlychanges, which habitually coincide with one another so that their habits are describable in simple ‘laws.’[83]

There is no original spirituality or materiality of being, intuitively discerned, then; but only a translocation of experiences from one world to another; a grouping of them with one set or another of associates for definitely practical or intellectual ends.

I will say nothing here of the persistent ambiguity ofrelations. They are undeniable parts of pure experience; yet, while common sense and what I call radical empiricism standfor their being objective, both rationalism and the usual empiricism claim that they are exclusively the ‘work of the mind’—the finite mind or the absolute mind, as the case may be.

Turn now to those affective phenomena which more directly concern us.

We soon learn to separate the ways in which things appeal to our interests and emotions from the ways in which they act upon one another. It does notworkto assume that physical objects are going to act outwardly by their sympathetic or antipathetic qualities. The beauty of a thing or its value is no force that can be plotted in a polygon of compositions, nor does its ‘use’ or ‘significance’ affect in the minutest degree its vicissitudes or destiny at the hands of physical nature. Chemical ‘affinities’ are a purely verbal metaphor; and, as I just said, even such things as forces, tensions, and activities can at a pinch be regarded as anthropomorphic projections. So far, then, as the physical world means the collection of contents that determine in each other certainregular changes, the whole collection of our appreciative attributes has to be treated as falling outside of it. If we mean by physical nature whatever lies beyond the surface of our bodies, these attributes are inert throughout the whole extent of physical nature.

Why then do men leave them as ambiguous as they do, and not class them decisively as purely spiritual?

The reason would seem to be that, although they are inert as regards the rest of physical nature, they are not inert as regards that part of physical nature which our own skin covers. It is those very appreciative attributes of things, their dangerousness, beauty, rarity, utility, etc., that primarily appeal to our attention. In our commerce with nature these attributes are what giveemphasisto objects; and for an object to be emphatic, whatever spiritual fact it may mean, means also that it produces immediate bodily effects upon us, alterations of tone and tension, of heart-beat and breathing, of vascular and visceral action. The ‘interesting’ aspects of things are thusnot wholly inert physically, though they be active only in these small corners of physical nature which our bodies occupy. That, however, is enough to save them from being classed as absolutely non-objective.

The attempt, if any one should make it, to sort experiences into two absolutely discrete groups, with nothing but inertness in one of them and nothing but activities in the other, would thus receive one check. It would receive another as soon as we examined the more distinctively mental group; for though in that group it be true that things do not act on one another by their physical properties, do not dent each other or set fire to each other, they yet act on each other in the most energetic way by those very characters which are so inert extracorporeally. It is by the interest and importance that experiences have for us, by the emotions they excite, and the purposes they subserve, by their affective values, in short, that their consecution in our several conscious streams, as ‘thoughts’ of ours, is mainly ruled. Desire introduces them; interestholds them; fitness fixes their order and connection. I need only refer for this aspect of our mental life, to Wundt’s article ‘Ueber psychische Causalität,’ which begins Volume X. of hisPhilosophische Studien.[84]

It thus appears that the ambiguous or amphibiousstatuswhich we find our epithets of value occupying is the most natural thing in the world. It would, however, be an unnatural status if the popular opinion which I cited at the outset were correct. If ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ meant two different kinds of intrinsic nature, immediately, intuitively, and infallibly discernible, and each fixed forever in whatever bit of experience it qualified, one does not see how there could ever have arisen any room for doubt or ambiguity. But if, on the contrary, these words are words of sorting, ambiguity is natural. For then, as soon as the relations of a thing are sufficiently various it can be sorted variously.Take a mass of carrion, for example, and the ‘disgustingness’ which for us is part of the experience. The sun caresses it, and the zephyr wooes it as if it were a bed of roses. So the disgustingness fails tooperatewithin the realm of suns and breezes,—it does not function as a physical quality. But the carrion ‘turns our stomach’ by what seems a direct operation—itdoesfunction physically, therefore, in that limited part of physics. We can treat it as physical or as non-physical according as we take it in the narrower or in the wider context, and conversely, of course, we must treat it as non-mental or as mental.

Our body itself is the palmary instance of the ambiguous. Sometimes I treat my body purely as a part of outer nature. Sometimes, again, I think of it as ‘mine,’ I sort it with the ‘me,’ and then certain local changes and determinations in it pass for spiritual happenings. Its breathing is my ‘thinking,’ its sensorial adjustments are my ‘attention,’ its kinesthetic alterations are my ‘efforts,’ its visceral perturbations are my ‘emotions.’The obstinate controversies that have arisen over such statements as these (which sound so paradoxical, and which can yet be made so seriously) prove how hard it is to decide by bare introspection what it is in experiences that shall make them either spiritual or material. It surely can be nothing intrinsic in the individual experience. It is their way of behaving towards each other, their system of relations, their function; and all these things vary with the context in which we find it opportune to consider them.

I think I may conclude, then (and I hope that my readers are now ready to conclude with me), that the pretended spirituality of our emotions and of our attributes of value, so far from proving an objection to the philosophy of pure experience, does, when rightly discussed and accounted for, serve as one of its best corroborations.

FOOTNOTES:[75][Reprinted fromThe Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.ii, No. 11, May 25, 1905.][76]It will be still better if he shall have also read the [essay] entitled ‘A World of Pure Experience,’ which follows [the first] and develops its ideas still farther.[77][Cf.The Principles of Psychology, vol.ii, ch.xxv; and “The Physical Basis of Emotion,”The Psychological Review, vol.i, 1894, p. 516.][78][See above, pp.34,35.][79]Page102.[80][Cf. Janet and Séailles:History of the Problems of Philosophy, trans. by Monahan, parti, ch.iii.][81][Cf. Descartes:Meditationii;Principles of Philosophy, parti,XLVIII.][82][Cf. A. E. Taylor:Elements of Metaphysics, bk.iii, ch.iv.][83][Cf. K. Pearson:Grammar of Science, ch.iii.][84]It is enough for my present purpose if the appreciative characters butseemto act thus. Believers in an activityan sich, other than our mental experiences of activity, will find some farther reflections on the subject in my address on ‘The Experience of Activity.’ [The next essay. Cf. especially, p.169.Ed.]

[75][Reprinted fromThe Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol.ii, No. 11, May 25, 1905.]

[76]It will be still better if he shall have also read the [essay] entitled ‘A World of Pure Experience,’ which follows [the first] and develops its ideas still farther.

[77][Cf.The Principles of Psychology, vol.ii, ch.xxv; and “The Physical Basis of Emotion,”The Psychological Review, vol.i, 1894, p. 516.]

[78][See above, pp.34,35.]

[79]Page102.

[80][Cf. Janet and Séailles:History of the Problems of Philosophy, trans. by Monahan, parti, ch.iii.]

[81][Cf. Descartes:Meditationii;Principles of Philosophy, parti,XLVIII.]

[82][Cf. A. E. Taylor:Elements of Metaphysics, bk.iii, ch.iv.]

[83][Cf. K. Pearson:Grammar of Science, ch.iii.]

[84]It is enough for my present purpose if the appreciative characters butseemto act thus. Believers in an activityan sich, other than our mental experiences of activity, will find some farther reflections on the subject in my address on ‘The Experience of Activity.’ [The next essay. Cf. especially, p.169.Ed.]

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 to reach definitive conclusions, I yet can show, in a rather definite manner, how the method works.

The way of handling things I speak of, is, as you already will have suspected, that known sometimes as the pragmatic method, sometimes as humanism, sometimes as Deweyism, and in France, by some of the disciples of Bergson, as the Philosophie nouvelle. Professor Woodbridge’sJournal of Philosophy[86]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 of ‘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 activityas 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.”[87]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 travestyof Herbartian psychology by one who has tried to improve upon it without being at the pains to master it.”[88]Münsterberg excludes a view opposed to his own by saying that with any one who holds it aVerständigungwith him is “grundsätzlich ausgeschlossen”; and Royce, in a review of Stout,[89]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 ofdurcheinander.

(1) 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?”

(2) There is a metaphysical question: “Is there afactof activity? and if so, what idea must we frame of it? What is it like? and whatdoes it do, if it does anything?” And finally there is a logical question:

(3) “Whence do weknowactivity? 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 proferred 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 adversary’s 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 ofopinion 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 experient; 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 sortof 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 whatwe 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 anythinggoing on. Taken in the broadest sense, any apprehension of somethingdoing, is an experience of activity. Were 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 experient to be at all is to be active. It seems to justify, or at any rate to explain, Mr. Ward’s expression that weareonly as we are active,[90]for weareonly as experients; and it rules out Mr. Bradley’s contention that “there is no original experience of anything like activity.”[91]What we ought to say about activities thus elementary, whose they are, what they effect, or whether indeed they effect anything at all—these are later questions, to be answered only when the field of experience is enlarged.

Bare activity would thus be predicable, though there were no definite direction, no actor, and no aim. Mere restless zigzag movement, or a wildIdeenflucht, orRhapsodie der Wahrnehmungen, as Kant would say,[92]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.[93]In their descriptions, exquisitelysubtle some of them,[94]the activity appears as thegestaltqualitätor thefundirte inhalt(or as 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?[95]They never take us off the superficial plane. We knew the facts already—less spread out and separated, to be sure—but we knew them still. We always felt our own activity, for example, as ‘the expansion of an idea with which our Self is identified, against an obstacle’;[96]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 immanent, as when a body moves in empty space by its momentum, or our thoughts wander at their own sweet will. If resistance is met,itsagent 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.

Whosoever describes an experience in such terms as these describes an experienceofactivity. If the word have any meaning, it must denote what there is found.Thereis complete activity in its original and first intention. What it 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 ever can be imagined whereactivity 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, ultimatequaliaas 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 prevailed. Lotze somewhere says that to be an entity all that is necessary is togeltenas an entity, to operate, or be felt, experienced, recognized, or in any way realized, as such.[97]In our activity-experiences the activity assuredly fulfils Lotze’s demand. It makes itselfgelten. It is witnessed at its work. No matter what activities there may really be in this extraordinary universe of ours, it is impossiblefor 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 anyone who has lived through the experience, but to no one else; just as ‘loud,’ ‘red,’ ‘sweet,’ mean something only to beings with ears, eyes, and tongues. Thepercipiin these originals of experience is theesse; 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.[98]Itis 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 tellaboutthem that has led such able writers to conceive of aSimon-pureactivity, of an activityan sich, that does, and doesn’tmerely appear to us to do, 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 we feel a will to stand a strain. Does our feeling do more thanrecordthe fact that the strain is sustained? Therealactivity, meanwhile, is thedoingof the fact; and what is the doing made of before the record is made. What in the willenablesit to act thus? And these trains of experience themselves, in which activities appear, what makes themgoat all? Does the activity in one bit of experience bring the next bit into being? As anempiricist you cannot say so, for you have just declared activity to be only a kind of synthetic object, or conjunctive relation experienced between bits of experience already made. But what made them at all? What propels experienceüberhauptinto being?Thereis the activity thatoperates; the activityfeltis 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 itsgoal; 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 thatyouare acting while you are only obeying someone’s push. You think you are doingthis, 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 theultimate outcomeof an activity as what it is more really doing; andthe most previous agentascertainable, 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 our best example. My brain-cells are believed to excite each other from next to next (by contiguous transmission of katabolic 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.Cessante causa, cessat et effectus—does not this 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,[99]in my mental activity-situation the words physically to beuttered 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; thefactsof activity are elsewhere. They are something far more interstitial, so to speak, than what my feelings record.

Therealfacts 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 resultant motor discharges are the acts achieved.

Now if we must de-realize 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 naïvely that ‘I’ am active now in delivering this address, I say thata wider thinker is active, or thatcertain ideas are active, or thatcertain 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 envelope mine. I am really lecturingforhim; 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 ends prolong my own. So long as I take himreligiously, in short, he does not de-realize my activities. He tends rather to corroborate the reality of them, so long as I believe both them and him to be good.

When now we 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 prevision 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.Imay have ulterior developments in view; but thereis 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, asIperceive it, is indifferent to the agents, and neither wished or willed or foreseen. Their 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 questionWhose is the real activity?is thus tantamount to the questionWhat 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 is the old dispute come back! Materialism and teleology; elementary short-span actions summing themselves ‘blindly,’ or far foreseen ideals coming with effort into act.

Naïvely 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 themodus operandiof 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 that 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[100]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 propounded, I think that it always arises from two things, a belief thatcausalitymust 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 caughtin flagrante delictothe very power that makes facts come and be. I now am 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 from the state of merely possible being in which they were. How is this feat performed? How does the pullingpull? How do I get my hold on words not yet existent, and when they come by what means have Imadethem come? Really it is the problem of creation; for in the end the question is: How doI make thembe? 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 therebereal creative activities in being, radical empiricism must say, somewhere they must be immediately lived. Somewhere thethatof efficacious causing and thewhatof it must be experienced in one, just as the what and the 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 arcticcircle 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 come 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 causalityis, 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 othernatureof thing than that which even in our most erroneous experiences appears to be at work. Exactly what appears there is what wemeanby working, though we may later come to learn that working was not exactlythere. Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying with effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving our intention—thisisaction, thisiseffectuation in the only shape in which, by a pure experience-philosophy, the whereabouts of itanywhere can be discussed. Here is creation in its first intention, here is causality at work.[101]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.[102]

I conclude, then, that real effectual causation as an ultimate nature, as a ‘category,’ if you like, of reality, isjust what we feel it to be, just that kind of conjunction which our own activity-series reveal. We have the whole butt and being of it in our hands; and the healthy thingfor philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground for what effects effectuation, or what makes action act, and to try to solve the concrete questions of where effectuation in this world is located, of which things are the 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 onlyuseof the knowledge would be to help us to 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 elementsthings, or be they 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’sAnalytic Psychology[103]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 of defeat, of hoping and of striving, of longing, of desire, and of 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 co-exist 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 steer 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 suchquestions, 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.[104]The results of these authors seem in many respects dissimilar, and I understand than as yet but 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.

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