this: 'Book,' 'table,' 'on'--how does the existence of these three
abstract elements result in _this_ book being livingly on _this_
table? Why isn't the table on the book? Or why doesn't the 'on'
connect itself with another book, or something that is not a table?
Mustn't something _in_ each of the three elements already determine
the two others to _it_, so that they do not settle elsewhere or float
vaguely? Mustn't the whole fact be _prefigured in each part_, and
exist _de jure_ before it can exist _de facto_? But, if so, in what
can the jural existence consist, if not in a spiritual miniature of
the whole fact's constitution actuating; every partial factor as its
purpose? But is this anything but the old metaphysical fallacy of
looking behind a fact _in esse_ for the ground of the fact, and
finding it in the shape of the very same fact _in posse_? Somewhere we
must leave off with a _constitution_ behind which there is nothing.]
says, 'I must begin with _A_ or _B_. And beginning, say with _A_, if
I then merely find _B_, I have either lost _A_, or I have got beside
_A_, [_the word 'beside' seems here vital, as meaning a conjunction
'external' and therefore unintelligible_] something else, and in
neither case have I understood.[1] For my intellect cannot simply
unite a diversity, nor has it in itself any form or way of
togetherness, and you gain nothing if, beside _A_ and _B_, you offer
me their conjunction in fact. For to my intellect that is no more
than another external element. And "facts," once for all, are for my
intellect not true unless they satisfy it.... The intellect has in its
nature no principle of mere togetherness' (pp. 570, 572).
Of course Mr. Bradley has a right to define 'intellect' as the power
by which we perceive separations but not unions--provided he give
due notice to the reader. But why then claim that such a maimed and
amputated power must reign supreme in philosophy, and accuse on its
behoof the whole empirical world of irrationality? It is true that he
elsewhere (p. 568) attributes to the intellect a _proprius motus_ of
transition, but says that
[Footnote 1: Apply this to the case of 'book-on-table'! W.J.]
when he looks for _these_ transitions in the detail of living
experience, he 'is unable to verify such a solution' (p. 569).
Yet he never explains what the intellectual transitions would be like
in case we had them. He only defines them negatively--they are not
spatial, temporal, predicative, or causal; or qualitatively or
otherwise serial; or in any way relational as we naïvely trace
relations, for relations _separate_ terms, and need themselves to be
hooked on _ad infinitum_. The nearest approach he makes to describing
a truly intellectual transition is where he speaks of _A_ and _B_
as being 'united, each from its own nature, in a whole which is the
nature of both alike' (p. 570). But this (which, _pace_ Mr. Bradley,
seems exquisitely analogous to 'taking a congeries in a lump,' if
not to 'swamping') suggests nothing but that _conflux_ which pure
experience so abundantly offers, as when 'space,' 'white,' and 'sweet'
are confluent in a 'lump of sugar,' or kinesthetic, dermal, and
optical sensations confluent in 'my hand.'[1] All that I can verify
in the transitions which Mr. Bradley's intellect desiderates as
its _proprius motus_ is a reminiscence of these and other sensible
conjunctions (especially space-conjunctions),
[Footnote 1: How meaningless is the contention that in such wholes
(or in 'book-on-table,' 'watch-in-pocket,' etc.) the relation is an
additional entity _between_ the terms, needing itself to be related
again to each! Both Bradley (_Appearance and Reality_, pp. 32-33) and
Royce (_The World and the Individual_, i, 128) lovingly repeat this
piece of profundity.]
but a reminiscence so vague that its originals are not recognized.
Bradley, in short, repeats the fable of the dog, the bone, and its
image in the water. With a world of particulars, given in loveliest
union, in conjunction definitely various, and variously definite,
the 'how' of which you 'understand' as soon as you see the fact of
them,[1] for there is no how except the constitution of the fact as
given; with all this given him, I say, in pure experience, he asks for
some ineffable union in the abstract instead, which, if he gained
it, would only be a duplicate of what he has already in his full
possession. Surely he abuses the privilege which society grants to all
of us philosophers, of being puzzle-headed.
Polemic writing like this is odious; but with absolutism in possession
in so many quarters, omission to defend my radical empiricism against
its best known champion would count as either superficiality or
inability. I have to conclude that its dialectic has not invalidated
in the least degree the usual conjunctions by which the world, as
experienced, hangs so variously together. In particular it leaves an
empirical theory of knowledge intact, and lets us continue to believe
with common sense that one object _may_ be known, if we have any
ground for thinking that it _is_ known, to many knowers.
[Footnote 1: The 'why' and the 'whence' are entirely other questions,
not under discussion, as I understand Mr. Bradley. Not how experience
gets itself born, but how it can be what it is after it is born, is
the puzzle.]
APPENDIX B
THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY[1]
... 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.' Münsterberg excludes a view opposed
to his own by saying that with any one who holds it a _verständigung_
with him is '_grundsätzlich 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-qualität_
[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 _Grundzüge_, Part II, chap, ix, §
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 gratiâ_:'The feeling of activity is not able,
quâ 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 tätigkeitsgefühle leigt an sich nicht der
geringste beweis für das vorhandensein einer psychischen tätigkeit'
(Münsterberg: _Grundzüge_, 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 Münsterberg'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 _überhaupt_ into being? _There_
is the activity that _operates_; the activity _felt_ is only its
superficial sign.'