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 omissions1, 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.]
Brethren of the Psychological Association:
IN casting about me for a subject for your President this year to talk about it has seemed to me that our experiences of activity would form a good one; not only because the topic is so naturally interesting, and because it has lately led to a good deal of rather inconclusive discussion, but because I myself am growing more and more interested in a certain systematic3 way of handling questions, and want to get others interested also, and this question strikes me as one in which, although I am painfully aware of my inability to communicate new discoveries or to reach definitive4 conclusions, I yet can show, in a rather definite manner, how the method works.
The way of handling things I speak of, is, as you already will have suspected, that known sometimes as the pragmatic method, sometimes as humanism, sometimes as Deweyism, and in France, by some of the disciples5 of Bergson, as the Philosophie nouvelle. Professor Woodbridge’s Journal of Philosophy64 seems unintentionally to have become a sort of meeting place for those who follow these tendencies in America. There is only a dim identity among them; and the most that can be said at present is that some sort of gestation7 seems to be in the atmosphere, and that almost any day a man with a genius for finding the right word for things may hit upon some unifying8 and conciliating formula that will make so much vaguely9 similar aspiration10 crystallize into more definite form.
64 [The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology11 and Scientific Methods.]
I myself have given the name of ‘radical12 empiricism’ to that version of the tendency in question which I prefer; and I propose, if you will now let me, to illustrate13 what I mean by radical empiricism, by applying it to activity as an example, hoping at the same time incidentally to leave the general problem of activity in a slightly — I fear very slightly — more manageable shape than before.
Mr. Bradley calls the question of activity a scandal to philosophy, and if one turns to the current literature of the subject — his own writings included — one easily gathers what he means. The opponents cannot even understand one another. Mr. Bradley says to Mr. Ward14: “I do not care what your oracle15 is, and your preposterous16 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.”65 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 travesty17 of Herbartian psychology by one who has tried to improve upon it without being at the pains to master it.”66 Munsterberg excludes a view opposed to his own by saying that with any one who holds it a Verstandigung with him is “grundsatzlich ausgeschlosen”; and Royce, in a review of Stoud,67 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 Stout18 himself say was quite foreign to the intention of his text.
65 Appearance and Reality, second edition. pp. 116–117. — Obviously written at Ward, though Ward’s name is not mentioned
66 [Mind, vol. XII, 1887, pp. 573–574.]
67 Mind, N.S., vol. VI, 1897, p. 379.
In these discussion distinct questions are habitually19 jumbled20 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 solely21? 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 mere22 description of the surface-show of experience is proffered23 as if it implicitly24 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 triumphant25.
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 tangles26, or at least to simplify them somewhat. The pragmatic method starts from the postulate27 that there is no difference of truth that does n’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 methodological 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 experiencable somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must be somewhere 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 pointed29 out. Whatever ulterior judgements we may eventually come to make regarding activity, that sort of thing will be what the judgements 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 tempted30 to affirm activity wherever we find anything going on. Taken in the broadest sense, any apprehension31 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 rehabilitate32 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 subjective33 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 justify34, or at any rate to explain, Mr. Ward’s expression that we are only as we are active,68 for we are only as experients; and it rules out Mr. Bradley’s contention35 that “there is no original experience of anything like activity.”69 What we ought to say about activities thus elementary, whose they are, what they effect, or whether indeed they effect anything at all — these are later questions, to be answered only when the field of experience is enlarged.
68 Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. II, p.245. One thinks naturally of the peripatetic36 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: Dictionaire de Philosophie, under ‘acte.’ ED.]
69 [Appearance and Reality, second edition, p. 116.]
Bare activity would thus be predicable, though there were no definite direction, no actor, and no aim. Mere restless zigzag37 movement, or a wild Ideenflucht, or Rhapsodie der Wharnehmungen, as Kant would say,70 would constitute and active as distinguished38 from an inactive world.
70 [Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Werke, (1905), vol. IV, p. 110 (trans. by Max Muller, second edition, p. 128).]
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 a sense of goal; it comes complicated with resistances which it overcomes or succumbs39 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.71 In their descriptions, exquisitely40 subtle some of them,72 the activity appears as the gestaltqualitat 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 forth41. Those factors in those relations are what we mean by activity-situations; and to the possible enumeration42 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?73 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’;74 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 synonymic43 speech.
71 I refer to such descriptive work as Ladd’s (Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory, part I, chap. V, part II, chap. XI, part III, chaps. XXV and XXVI); as Sully’s (The Human Mind, part V); as Stout’s (Analytic44 Psychology, book I, chap. vi, and book II, chaps. I, II, and III); as Bradley’s (in his long series of articles on Psychology in Mind); as Titchener’s (Outline of Psychology, part I, chap. vi); as Shand’s (Mind, N.S., III, 449; IV, 450; VI, 289); as Ward’s (Mind, XII, 67; 564); as Loveday’s (Mind, N.S., X, 455); as Lipp’s (Vom Fuhlen, Wollen Und Denken, 1902, chaps II, IV, VI); and as Bergson’s (Revue Philosophique, LIII, 1) — to mention only a few writings which I immediately recall.
72 Their existence forms a curious commentary on Prof. 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 Grundzuge [der Psychologie], part II, chap. IX, section 7.
73 I ought myself to cry peccavi, having been a voluminous sinner in my own chapter on the will. [Principles of Psychology, vol. II, chap. XXVI.]
74 [Cf. F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, second edition, pp. 96–97.]
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 momentum47, or our thoughts wander at their own sweet will. If resistance is met, its agent complicates48 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 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 intensity49, the movement, the weight and color, the pain and pleasure, the complexity50, 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, obstruction51, 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 entity6 all that is necessary is to gelten as an entity, to operate, or be felt, experienced, recognized, or in any way realized, as such.75 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 authentically52 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.
75 [Cf. above, p. 59, note.]
This seems so obviously true that one might well experience astonishment53 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 affects at all.76 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, an activity an sich, that does, and does n’t merely appear to us to do, and compared with whose real doing all this phenomenal activity is but a specious55 sham56.
79 Verborum gratia: “The feeling of activity is not able, qua feeling, to tell us anything about activity” (Loveday: Mind, N.S., vol, X, [1901], p. 463; “A sensation or feeling or sense of activity . . . is not, looked at in another way, an experience 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 only so for extraneous57 reasons and only so for an outside observer” (Bradley, Appearance and Reality, second edition, p.605); “In dem Tatigkeitsgefuhle liegt an sich nicht der geringste Beweis fur das Vorhandesein einer psychischen Tatigkeit” (Munsterberg: Grundzuge der Psychologie). I could multiply similar quotations58 and would have introduced some of them into my text to make it more concrete, save that the mingling59 of different points of view in most of these author’s discussions (not in Munsterberg’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 omission2 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 apropos60 of misunderstandings, I may add to this note a complaint on my own account. Professor Stoud, 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 nucleus61 of the activities that we call ‘ours’ is. [Principles of Psychology, vol. I, pp. 299–305.] 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 [the first essay], ‘Does Consciousness Exist?’). 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 specification62 of this something into two whats, an activity felt as ‘ours,’ and an activity ascribed to objects. Stout, as I apprehend63 him, identifies ‘our’ activity with that of the total experience-process, and when I circumscribe64 it as a part thereof, accuses me of treating it as a sort of external appendage65 to itself (Stout: op.cit., vol. I, 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 strictly66 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 dealing67 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 at 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 instinctive68 (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, there 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. [Cf. also A Pluralistic Universe, p. 344, note 8. ED.] 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 prerogative69 emphasis, and, if activities have feelings, must be felt in a particular 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.
The metaphysical question opens here; and I think that the state of mind of one possessed70 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 synthetic71 object, or conjunctive relation experienced between bits of experience already made. But what made them at all? What propels experience uberhaupt 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 immediate45 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 purely72 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 subjectively73 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 acting74 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 onlooker75, 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 ascertainable76, being the first source of action, he regards as the most real agent in the field. The others but transmit the 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 a 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 alteration77, 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 disorder78 of form. Cessante causa, cessat et effectus — does not this look as if the short-span brain activiteis were the more real activities, and the lecturing activities on my part only their effects? Moreover, as Hume so clearly pointed out,77 in my mental activity-situation the words physically79 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.
77 [Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect46 VII, part I, Selby–Bigge’s edition, pp. 65 ff.]
The real facts of activity that have in point of fact been systematically80 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 never-cells are the agents, and that resultant motor discharges are the acts achieved.
Now if we must derealize 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 naively81 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 connive82. I can be happy in thinking that my activity transmits his impulse, and that his ends prolong my own. Son long as I take him religiously, in short, he does not derealize my activities. He tends rather to corroborate83 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 recur84 again from their activity. In point of fact, all sorts of other results do occur. My mistakes, impotencies, perversions85, mental obstructions86, and frustrations87 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 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! Materialism88 and teleology89; 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 yoke90 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 steering92 of small tendencies by large ones is a problem which metaphysical thinkers will have to ruminate93 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 philosophic94 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 contemptibly95 small process on which success depends. A little thrombus in a statesman’s meningeal artery96 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 inquiries97 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 back78 that I should return to the ‘metaphysical’ question before ending; so, with a few words about that, I will now close my remarks.
78 Page 172.
In whatever form we hear this question propounded98, 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 drawn99 or pulled them into actuality out from the state of merely possible being in which they were. How is this feat28 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 radically100 empirical philosophy is obliged to rely in handling such a dispute.
If there be real creative activiteis 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 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 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, persevering101, 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.79 To treat this offhand102 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.80
79 Let me not be told that this contradicts [the first essay], ‘Does Consciousness Exist?’ (see especially page 32), 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 energize103 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.
80 I have found myself more than once accused in print of being the assertor of a metaphysical principle of activity. Since literary misunderstandings retard104 the settlement of problems, I should like to say that such an interpretation105 of the pages I have published on Effort and on Will is absolutely foreign to what I mean to express. [Principles of Psychology, vol II, ch. XXVI.] I owe all my doctrines106 on this subject to Renouvier; and Renouvier, as I understand him, is (or at any rate then was) an out and out phenomenalist, a denier of ‘forces’ in the most strenuous107 sense. [Cf. Ch. Renouvier: Esquisse d’une Classification Systematique des Doctrines Philosophiques (1885), vol. II, pp. 390–392; Essais de Critique Generale (1859), vol. II, sections ix, xiii. For an acknowledgement of the author’s general indebtedness to Renouvier, cf. Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 165, note. ED.] Single clauses in my writing, or sentences read out of their connection, may possibly have been compatible with a transphenomenal principle of energy; but I defy anyone 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 defending (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 phenomena54, but I never say, nor do I now see, what the principle could do except rehearse the phenomenon beforehand, or why it ever should be invoked108.
[?????] 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 sublimity109 traditionally attributed to the metaphysical inquiry110, the grubbing inquiry, entirely111 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 sublime112 than any other inquiry equally abstract. Causation inhabits no more sublime level than anything else. It lives, apparently113, 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 Psychology81 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 helping114 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 longing115, of desire, and of inner value. It is a total presence that embodies116 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.
81 Mind, N.S., vol. VI, 1897; cf. pp. 392–393.
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 inertly117, or do they exert control? Or do they perhaps utterly118 supplant119 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 steer91 the neural120 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 pan-psychic and ontologic speculation121 of which Professors Bergson and Strong have lately enlarged the literature in so able and interesting a way.82 The result 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 promising122, and that they have the hunter’s instinct for the fruitful trails.
82 [Cf. A Pluralistic Universe, Lect. VI (on Bergson); H. Bergson: Creative Evolution, trans. by A. Mitchell; C.A. Strong: Why the Mind Has a Body, ch. XII. ED.]
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omissions
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| n.省略( omission的名词复数 )；删节；遗漏；略去或漏掉的事（或人） | |
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omission
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| n.省略，删节；遗漏或省略的事物，冗长 | |
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systematic
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| adj.有系统的，有计划的，有方法的 | |
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definitive
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| adj.确切的，权威性的；最后的，决定性的 | |
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disciples
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| n.信徒( disciple的名词复数 )；门徒；耶稣的信徒；（尤指）耶稣十二门徒之一 | |
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entity
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| n.实体，独立存在体，实际存在物 | |
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gestation
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| n.怀孕；酝酿 | |
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unifying
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| 使联合( unify的现在分词 )； 使相同； 使一致； 统一 | |
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vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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aspiration
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| n.志向，志趣抱负；渴望；(语)送气音；吸出 | |
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psychology
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| n.心理，心理学，心理状态 | |
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radical
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| n.激进份子，原子团，根号；adj.根本的，激进的，彻底的 | |
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illustrate
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| v.举例说明，阐明；图解，加插图 | |
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ward
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| n.守卫，监护，病房，行政区，由监护人或法院保护的人（尤指儿童）；vt.守护，躲开 | |
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oracle
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| n.神谕，神谕处，预言 | |
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preposterous
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| adj.荒谬的，可笑的 | |
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travesty
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| n.歪曲，嘲弄，滑稽化 | |
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habitually
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| ad.习惯地，通常地 | |
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jumbled
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| adj.混乱的；杂乱的 | |
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solely
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| adv.仅仅，唯一地 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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proffered
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| v.提供，贡献，提出( proffer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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implicitly
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| adv. 含蓄地, 暗中地, 毫不保留地 | |
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triumphant
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| adj.胜利的，成功的；狂欢的，喜悦的 | |
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tangles
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| （使）缠结， （使）乱作一团( tangle的第三人称单数 ) | |
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postulate
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| n.假定，基本条件；vt.要求，假定 | |
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feat
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| n.功绩；武艺，技艺；adj.灵巧的，漂亮的，合适的 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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tempted
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| v.怂恿（某人）干不正当的事；冒…的险（tempt的过去分词） | |
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apprehension
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| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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rehabilitate
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| vt.改造(罪犯)，修复；vi.复兴，(罪犯)经受改造 | |
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subjective
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| a.主观(上)的，个人的 | |
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justify
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| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
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contention
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| n.争论，争辩，论战；论点，主张 | |
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peripatetic
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| adj.漫游的，逍遥派的，巡回的 | |
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zigzag
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| n.曲折，之字形；adj.曲折的，锯齿形的；adv.曲折地，成锯齿形地；vt.使曲折；vi.曲折前行 | |
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distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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succumbs
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| 不再抵抗（诱惑、疾病、攻击等）( succumb的第三人称单数 )； 屈从； 被压垮； 死 | |
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exquisitely
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| adv.精致地；强烈地；剧烈地；异常地 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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enumeration
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| n.计数，列举；细目；详表；点查 | |
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synonymic
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| 同义的 | |
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analytic
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| adj.分析的，用分析方法的 | |
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immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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sect
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| n.派别，宗教，学派，派系 | |
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momentum
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| n.动力，冲力，势头；动量 | |
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complicates
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| 使复杂化( complicate的第三人称单数 ) | |
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intensity
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| n.强烈，剧烈；强度；烈度 | |
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complexity
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| n.复杂(性)，复杂的事物 | |
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51
obstruction
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| n.阻塞，堵塞；障碍物 | |
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authentically
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| ad.sincerely真诚地 | |
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53
astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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54
phenomena
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| n.现象 | |
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55
specious
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| adj.似是而非的；adv.似是而非地 | |
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sham
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| n./adj.假冒(的)，虚伪(的) | |
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extraneous
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| adj.体外的；外来的；外部的 | |
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58
quotations
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| n.引用( quotation的名词复数 )；[商业]行情（报告）；（货物或股票的）市价；时价 | |
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mingling
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| adj.混合的 | |
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apropos
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| adv.恰好地；adj.恰当的；关于 | |
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nucleus
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| n.核，核心，原子核 | |
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specification
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| n.详述；[常pl.]规格，说明书，规范 | |
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apprehend
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| vt.理解，领悟，逮捕，拘捕，忧虑 | |
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64
circumscribe
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| v.在...周围划线，限制，约束 | |
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appendage
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| n.附加物 | |
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strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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dealing
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| n.经商方法，待人态度 | |
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instinctive
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| adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的 | |
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prerogative
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| n.特权 | |
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possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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synthetic
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| adj.合成的，人工的；综合的；n.人工制品 | |
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purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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subjectively
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| 主观地； 臆 | |
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acting
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| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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onlooker
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| n.旁观者，观众 | |
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ascertainable
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| adj.可确定（探知），可发现的 | |
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alteration
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| n.变更，改变；蚀变 | |
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disorder
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| n.紊乱，混乱；骚动，骚乱；疾病，失调 | |
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physically
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| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
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systematically
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| adv.有系统地 | |
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naively
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| adv. 天真地 | |
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connive
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| v.纵容；密谋 | |
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corroborate
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| v.支持，证实，确定 | |
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recur
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| vi.复发，重现，再发生 | |
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perversions
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| n.歪曲( perversion的名词复数 )；变坏；变态心理 | |
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obstructions
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| n.障碍物( obstruction的名词复数 )；阻碍物；阻碍；阻挠 | |
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frustrations
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| 挫折( frustration的名词复数 )； 失败； 挫败； 失意 | |
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materialism
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| n.［哲］唯物主义，唯物论；物质至上 | |
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teleology
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| n.目的论 | |
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yoke
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| n.轭；支配；v.给...上轭，连接，使成配偶 | |
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steer
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| vt.驾驶，为…操舵；引导；vi.驾驶 | |
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steering
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| n.操舵装置 | |
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ruminate
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| v.反刍；沉思 | |
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philosophic
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| adj.哲学的，贤明的 | |
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contemptibly
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| adv.卑鄙地，下贱地 | |
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artery
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| n.干线，要道；动脉 | |
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inquiries
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| n.调查( inquiry的名词复数 )；疑问；探究；打听 | |
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propounded
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| v.提出（问题、计划等）供考虑[讨论]，提议( propound的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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radically
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| ad.根本地，本质地 | |
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persevering
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| a.坚忍不拔的 | |
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offhand
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| adj.临时，无准备的；随便，马虎的 | |
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energize
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| vt.给予(某人或某物)精力、能量 | |
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retard
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| n.阻止，延迟；vt.妨碍，延迟，使减速 | |
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interpretation
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| n.解释，说明，描述；艺术处理 | |
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doctrines
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| n.教条( doctrine的名词复数 )；教义；学说；（政府政策的）正式声明 | |
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strenuous
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| adj.奋发的，使劲的；紧张的；热烈的，狂热的 | |
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invoked
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| v.援引( invoke的过去式和过去分词 )；行使（权利等）；祈求救助；恳求 | |
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sublimity
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| 崇高，庄严，气质高尚 | |
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inquiry
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| n.打听，询问，调查，查问 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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sublime
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| adj.崇高的，伟大的；极度的，不顾后果的 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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helping
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| n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的 | |
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longing
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| n.（for）渴望 | |
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embodies
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| v.表现( embody的第三人称单数 )；象征；包括；包含 | |
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inertly
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| adv.不活泼地，无生气地 | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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supplant
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| vt.排挤；取代 | |
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neural
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| adj.神经的，神经系统的 | |
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speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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promising
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| adj.有希望的，有前途的 | |
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