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, exquisitely
subtle some of them,[94] the activity appears as the _gestaltqualitaet_
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?[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, _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.[97] 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 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. 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.[98] It
is evident from this that mere descriptive analysis of any one of our
activity-experiences is not the whole story, that there is something
still to tell _about_ them that has led such able writers to conceive of
a _Simon-pure_ activity, of an activity _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 we feel a will to stand a strain. Does our feeling do more than
_record_ the fact that the strain is sustained? The _real_ activity,
meanwhile, is the _doing_ of the fact; and what is the doing made of
before the record is made. What in the will _enables_ it to act thus?
And these trains of experience themselves, in which activities appear,
what makes them _go_ at all? Does the activity in one bit of experience
bring the next bit into being? As an empiricist you cannot say so, for
you have just declared activity to be only a kind of synthetic object,
or 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 someone's
push. You think you are doing _this_, but you are doing something of
which you do not dream. For instance, you think you are but drinking
this glass; but you are really creating the liver-cirrhosis that will
end your days. You think you are just driving this bargain, but, as
Stevenson says somewhere, you are laying down a link in the policy of
mankind.
Generally speaking, the onlooker, with his wider field of vision,
regards the _ultimate outcome_ of an activity as what it is more really
doing; and _the most previous agent_ ascertainable, being the first
source of action, he regards as the most real agent in the field. The
others but transmit that agent's impulse; on him we put responsibility;
we name him when one asks us 'Who's to blame?'
But the most previous agents ascertainable, instead of being of longer
span, are often of much shorter span than the activity in view.
Brain-cells are 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 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 envelope
mine. I am really lecturing _for_ him; and although I cannot surely know
to what end, yet if I take him religiously, I can trust it to be a good
end, and willingly connive. I can be happy in thinking that my activity
transmits his impulse, and that his 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. Although these are letting me lecture now, on other
occasions they make me do things that I would willingly not do.
The question _Whose is the real activity?_ is thus tantamount to the
question _What will be the actual results?_ Its interest is dramatic;
how will things work out? If the agents are of one sort, one way; if of
another sort, they may work out very differently. The pragmatic meaning
of the various alternatives, in short, is great. It makes no merely
verbal difference which opinion we take up.
You see it 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. 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 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, though we may later come to learn that working
was not exactly _there_. Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying
with effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving our
intention--this _is_ action, this _is_ effectuation in the only shape
in which, by a pure experience-philosophy, the whereabouts of it
anywhere can be discussed. Here is creation in its first intention,
here is causality at work.[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, 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 in the whole process, and in the meaning of the succession
stages which the elements work out.
My colleague and master, Josiah Royce, in a page of his review of
Stout's _Analytic Psychology_[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 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.[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.
FOOTNOTES:
[85] President's Address before the American Psychological Association,
Philadelphia Meeting, December, 1904. [Reprinted from _The Psychological
Review_, vol. XII, No. 1, Jan., 1905. Also reprinted, with some
omissions, as Appendix B, _A Pluralistic Universe_, pp. 370-394. Pp.
166-167 have also been reprinted in _Some Problems of Philosophy_, p.
212. The present essay is referred to in _ibid._, p. 219, note. The
author's corrections have been adopted for the present text. ED.]
[86] [_The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods._]
[87] _Appearance and Reality_, second edition, pp. 116-117.--Obviously
written _at_ Ward, though Ward's name is not mentioned.
[88] [_Mind_, vol. XII, 1887, pp. 573-574.]
[89] _Mind_, N. S., vol. VI, [1897], p. 379.
[90] _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. II, p. 245. One thinks naturally
of the peripatetic _actus primus_ and _actus secundus_ here. ["Actus
autem est _duplex_: _primus_ et _secundus_. Actus quidem primus est
forma, et integritas sei. Actus autem secundus est operatio." Thomas
Aquinas: _Summa Theologica_, edition of Leo XIII, (1894), vol. I, p.
391. Cf. also Blanc: _Dictionnaire de Philosophie_, under 'acte.' ED.]
[91] [_Appearance and Reality_, second edition, p. 116.]