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.
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 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.
APPENDIX C
ON THE NOTION OF REALITY AS CHANGING
In my _Principles of Psychology_ (vol. ii, p. 646) I gave the name of
the 'axiom of skipped intermediaries and transferred relations' to a
serial principle of which the foundation of logic, the _dictum de omni
et nullo_ (or, as I expressed it, the rule that what is of a kind is
of that kind's kind), is the most familiar instance. More than the
more is more than the less, equals of equals are equal, sames of the
same are the same, the cause of a cause is the cause of its effects,
are other examples of this serial law. Altho it applies infallibly
and without restriction throughout certain abstract series, where the
'sames,' 'causes,' etc., spoken of, are 'pure,' and have no properties
save their sameness, causality, etc., it cannot be applied offhand to
concrete objects with numerous properties and relations, for it is
hard to trace a straight line of sameness, causation, or whatever it
may be, through a series of such objects without swerving into some
'respect' where the relation, as pursued originally, no longer holds:
the objects have so many 'aspects' that we are constantly deflected
from our original direction, and find, we know not why, that we are
following something different from what we started with. Thus a cat is
in a sense the same as a mouse-trap, and a mouse-trap the same as a
bird-cage; but in no valuable or easily intelligible sense is a cat
the same as a bird-cage. Commodore Perry was in a sense the cause
of the new régime in Japan, and the new régime was the cause of the
russian Douma; but it would hardly profit us to insist on holding to
Perry as the cause of the Douma: the terms have grown too remote to
have any real or practical relation to each other. In every series of
real terms, not only do the terms themselves and their associates
and environments change, but we change, and their _meaning_ for
us changes, so that new kinds of sameness and types of causation
continually come into view and appeal to our interest. Our earlier
lines, having grown irrelevant, are then dropped. The old terms can no
longer be substituted nor the relations 'transferred,' because of so
many new dimensions into which experience has opened. Instead of a
straight line, it now follows a zigzag; and to keep it straight, one
must do violence to its spontaneous development. Not that one might
not possibly, by careful seeking (tho I doubt it), _find_ some line in
nature along which terms literally the same, or causes causal in the
same way, might be serially strung without limit, if one's interest
lay in such finding. Within such lines our axioms might hold, causes
might cause their effect's effects, etc.; but such lines themselves
would, if found, only be partial members of a vast natural network,
within the other lines of which you could not say, in any sense that
a wise man or a sane man would ever think of, in any sense that would
not be concretely _silly_, that the principle of skipt intermediaries
still held good. In the _practical_ world, the world whose
significances we follow, sames of the same are certainly not sames of
one another; and things constantly cause other things without being
held responsible for everything of which those other things are
causes.