... 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.'[2] 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 any one who holds it a verstaendigung with him
is 'grundsaetzlich ausgeschlossen'; and Royce,
[Footnote 1: President's Address before the American Psychological
Association, December, 1904. Reprinted from the Psychological Review, vol. xii, 1905, with slight verbal revision.]
[Footnote 2: Appearance and Reality, p. 117. Obviously
written at Ward, though Ward's name is not mentioned.]
in a review of Stout,[1] 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 durcheinander.
(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 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:
(3) 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 adversary's were triumphant.
[Footnote 1: Mind, N.S., VI, 379.]
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 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 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.
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 we
are only as we are active,[1]
[Footnote 1: Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii, p. 245. One
thinks naturally of the peripatetic actus primus and actus
secundus here.]
for we are only as experients; and it rules out Mr. Bradley's
contention that 'there is no original experience of anything like
activity.' What we ought to say about activities thus simply given,
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 wild ideenflucht, or rhapsodie der
wahrnehmungen, 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,[1] the activity appears as the gestalt-qualitaet
[Footnote 1: Their existence forms a curious commentary on Professor
Munsterberg's dogma that will-attitudes are not describable. He himself
has contributed in a superior way to their description, both in his
Willenshandlung, and in his Grundzuege, Part II, chap, ix,
Sec. 7.]
or the fundirte 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?[1] 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'; 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,
[Footnote 1: I ought myself to cry peccavi, having been a
voluminous sinner in my own chapter on the will.]
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, 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.
Whosoever 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 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 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
prevailed. Lotze somewhere says 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 fulfils Lotze'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,' mean something only to beings with ears,
eyes, and tongues. The percipi in these originals of experience
is the esse; 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.[1] It is evident from this that
[Footnote 1: Verborum gratia:'The feeling of activity is not
able, qua feeling, to tell us anything about activity' (Loveday:
Mind, N.S., X., 403); 'A sensation or feeling or sense of activity
... is not, looked at in another way, a feeling 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 activity at all.
It, as it comes first, is only so for extraneous reasons and only so
for an outside observer' (Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 2d
edition, p. 605); 'In dem taetigkeitsgefuehle leigt an sich nicht der
geringste beweis fuer das vorhandensein einer psychischen taetigkeit'
(Muensterberg: Grundzuege, etc., p. 67). 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 author's discussions (not in Muensterberg'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 vol. i 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. 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 'consciousness' as such, see my paper 'Does consciousness
exist?' in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. i, p. 477). 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
farther specification of this something into two whats,
an activity felt as '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
(pp. 162-163), 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,'
movements in our body 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 centre, centre
of vision, centre of action, centre 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 centre, the origin of co-ordinates,
the constant place of stress in all that experience-train. Everything
circles round 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 'this' position 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 perspective-interest in which they
are dyed.]
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 an sich, that does, and doesn't merely
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 that what we feel is 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 conjunctive relation experienced
between bits of experience already made. But what made them at all?
What propels experience ueberhaupt 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
some one'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 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, 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
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 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 altho 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 him religiously, 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. 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 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. Altho 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 more than a 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.
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. Therefore I cannot 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 awhile back (p. 381) 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 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
in flagrante delicto the 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 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 the question 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 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 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 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 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, tho 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.[1]
To treat this offhand as the bare illusory
[Footnote 1: Let me not be told that this contradicts a former
article of mine, 'Does consciousness exist?' in the Journal of
Philosophy for September 1, 1904 (see especially page 489), 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
oppugnancy 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.]
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.[1]
[Footnote 1: I have found myself more than once accused in print of
being the assertor 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 Renouvier; and Renouvier, 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 connexion, 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 having defended
(after Renouvier) 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 have ever thought of defending is
the character of novelty in fresh activity-situations. If an
activity-process is the form of a 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
ever should 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 butt 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 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 only use of 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
elements things, or be they the conjunctions of things; it exists
rather in the dramatic outcome of 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, in Mind for 1897, 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 all are
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 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 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 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.