Essays in Radical Empiricism Part 8

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,[92] would const.i.tute 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 succ.u.mbs 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 pa.s.sivity 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 a.n.a.lysis by various recent writers of the more complex activity-situations.[93] In their descriptions, exquisitely subtle some of them,[94] the activity appears as the _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 forth. Those factors in those relations are what we mean by activity-situations; and to the possible enumeration and acc.u.mulation of their circ.u.mstances 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s?[95] They never take us off the superficial plane. We knew the facts already--less spread out and separated, to be sure--but we knew them still. We always felt our own activity, for example, as 'the expansion of an idea with which our Self is identified, against an obstacle';[96] and the following out of such a definition through a mult.i.tude of cases elaborates the obvious so as to be little more than an exercise in synonymic speech.

All the descriptions have to trace familiar outlines, and to use familiar terms. The activity is, for example, attributed either to a physical or to a mental agent, and is either aimless or directed. If directed it shows tendency. The tendency may or may not be resisted. If not, we call the activity immanent, as when a body moves in empty s.p.a.ce 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 succ.u.mbed-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 pa.s.sive giving up, just as he feels the time, the s.p.a.ce, 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 ent.i.ty all that is necessary is to _gelten_ as an ent.i.ty, to operate, or be felt, experienced, recognized, or in any way realized, as such.[97] In our activity-experiences the activity a.s.suredly fulfils Lotze's demand. It makes itself _gelten_. It is witnessed at its work. No matter what activities there may really be in this extraordinary universe of ours, it is impossible for us to conceive of any one of them being either lived through or authentically known otherwise than in this dramatic shape of something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles and overcoming or being overcome.

What 'sustaining' means here is clear to anyone who has lived through the experience, but to no one else; just as 'loud,' 'red,' 'sweet,' mean something only to beings with ears, eyes, and tongues. The _percipi_ in these originals of experience is the _esse_; the curtain is the picture.

If there is anything hiding in the background, it ought not to be called activity, but should get itself another name.

This seems so obviously true that one might well experience astonishment at finding so many of the ablest writers on the subject flatly denying that the activity we live through in these situations is real. Merely to feel active is not to be active, in their sight. The agents that appear in the experience are not real agents, the resistances do not really resist, the effects that appear are not really effects at all.[98] It is evident from this that mere descriptive a.n.a.lysis of any one of our activity-experiences is not the whole story, that there is something still to tell _about_ them that has led such able writers to conceive of a _Simon-pure_ activity, of an activity _an sich_, that does, and doesn't merely appear to us to do, and compared with whose real doing all this phenomenal activity is but a specious sham.

The metaphysical question opens here; and I think that the state of mind of one possessed by it is often something like this: "It is all very well," we may imagine him saying, "to talk about certain experience-series taking on the form of feelings of activity, just as they might take on musical or geometric forms. Suppose that they do so; suppose we feel a will to stand a strain. Does our feeling do more than _record_ the fact that the strain is sustained? The _real_ activity, meanwhile, is the _doing_ of the fact; and what is the doing made of before the record is made. What in the will _enables_ it to act thus?

And these trains of experience themselves, in which activities appear, what makes them _go_ at all? Does the activity in one bit of experience bring the next bit into being? As an empiricist you cannot say so, for you have just declared activity to be only a kind of synthetic object, or conjunctive relation experienced between bits of experience already made. But what made them at all? What propels experience _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 immediate reticulations of experience, or asking what makes activity itself act, we still find the distinction between less real and more real activities forced upon us, and are driven to much soul-searching on the purely phenomenal plane.

We must not forget, namely, in talking of the ultimate character of our activity-experiences, that each of them is but a portion of a wider world, one link in the vast chain of processes of experience out of which history is made. Each partial process, to him who lives through it, defines itself by its origin and its goal; but to an observer with a wider mind-span who should live outside of it, that goal would appear but as a provisional halting-place, and the subjectively felt activity would be seen to continue into objective activities that led far beyond.

We thus acquire a habit, in discussing activity-experiences, of defining them by their relation to something more. If an experience be one of narrow span, it will be mistaken as to what activity it is and whose.

You think that _you_ are acting while you are only obeying someone's push. You think you are doing _this_, but you are doing something of which you do not dream. For instance, you think you are but drinking this gla.s.s; but you are really creating the liver-cirrhosis that will end your days. You think you are just driving this bargain, but, as Stevenson says somewhere, you are laying down a link in the policy of mankind.

Generally speaking, the onlooker, with his wider field of vision, regards the _ultimate outcome_ of an activity as what it is more really doing; and _the most previous agent_ ascertainable, being the first source of action, he regards as the most real agent in the field. The others but transmit that agent's impulse; on him we put responsibility; we name him when one asks us 'Who's to blame?'

But the most previous agents ascertainable, instead of being of longer span, are often of much shorter span than the activity in view.

Brain-cells are our best example. My brain-cells are believed to excite each other from next to next (by contiguous transmission of katabolic alteration, let us say) and to have been doing so long before this present stretch of lecturing-activity on my part began. If any one cell-group stops its activity, the lecturing will cease or show disorder of form. _Cessante causa, cessat et effectus_--does not this look as if the short-span brain activities were the more real activities, and the lecturing activities on my part only their effects? Moreover, as Hume so clearly pointed out,[99] in my mental activity-situation the words physically to be uttered are represented as the activity's immediate goal. These words, however, cannot be uttered without intermediate physical processes in the bulb and vagi nerves, which processes nevertheless fail to figure in the mental activity-series at all. That series, therefore, since it leaves out vitally real steps of action, cannot represent the real activities. It is something purely subjective; the _facts_ of activity are elsewhere. They are something far more interst.i.tial, 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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sumes 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 subst.i.tute, we ought to know what the subst.i.tution practically involves. _What practical difference ought it to make if_, instead of saying navely 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 a.s.sume a wider thinker, it is evident that his purposes envelope mine. I am really lecturing _for_ him; and although I cannot surely know to what end, yet if I take him religiously, I can trust it to be a good end, and willingly connive. I can be happy in thinking that my activity transmits his impulse, and that his ends prolong my own. So long as I take him religiously, in short, he does not de-realize my activities.

He tends rather to corroborate the reality of them, so long as I believe both them and him to be good.

When now we turn to ideas, the case is different, inasmuch as ideas are supposed by the a.s.sociation psychology to influence each other only from next to next. The 'span' of an idea or pair of ideas, is a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sing lecture is over, there is nothing in the bare notion that ideas have been its agents that would seem to guarantee that my present purposes in lecturing will be prolonged. _I_ may have ulterior developments in view; but there is no certainty that my ideas as such will wish to, or be able to, work them out.

The like is true if nerve-cells be the agents. The activity of a nerve-cell must be conceived of as a tendency of exceedingly short reach, an 'impulse' barely spanning the way to the next cell--for surely that amount of actual 'process' must be 'experienced' by the cells if what happens between them is to deserve the name of activity at all. But here again the gross resultant, as _I_ perceive it, is indifferent to the agents, and neither wished or willed or foreseen. Their being agents now congruous with my will gives me no guarantee that like results will recur again from their activity. In point of fact, all sorts of other results do occur. My mistakes, impotencies, perversions, mental obstructions, and frustrations generally, are also results of the activity of cells. Although these are letting me lecture now, on other occasions they make me do things that I would willingly not do.

The question _Whose is the real activity?_ is thus tantamount to the question _What will be the actual results?_ Its interest is dramatic; how will things work out? If the agents are of one sort, one way; if of another sort, they may work out very differently. The pragmatic meaning of the various alternatives, in short, is great. It makes no merely verbal difference which opinion we take up.

You see it is the old dispute come back! Materialism and teleology; elementary short-span actions summing themselves 'blindly,' or far foreseen ideals coming with effort into act.

Navely 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 const.i.tution of tendencies, or of the relation of larger to smaller ones, can help us to predict which of all the various competing tendencies that interest us in this universe are likeliest to prevail. We know as an empirical fact that far-seeing tendencies often carry out their purpose, but we know also that they are often defeated by the failure of some contemptibly small process on which success depends. A little thrombus in a statesman's meningeal artery will throw an empire out of gear. I can therefore not even hint at any solution of the pragmatic issue. I have only wished to show you that that issue is what gives the real interest to all inquiries into what kinds of activity may be real. Are the forces that really act in the world more foreseeing or more blind? As between 'our' activities as 'we' experience them, and those of our ideas, or of our brain-cells, the issue is well-defined.

I said a while back[100] that I should return to the 'metaphysical'

question before ending; so, with a few words about that, I will now close my remarks.

In whatever form we hear this question propounded, I think that it always arises from two things, a belief that _causality_ must be exerted in activity, and a wonder as to how causality is made. If we take an activity-situation at its face-value, it seems as if we caught _in flagrante delicto_ the very power that makes facts come and be. I now am eagerly striving, for example, to get this truth which I seem half to perceive, into words which shall make it show more clearly. If the words come, it will seem as if the striving itself had drawn or pulled them into actuality out from the state of merely possible being in which they were. How is this feat performed? How does the pulling _pull_? How do I get my hold on words not yet existent, and when they come by what means have I _made_ them come? Really it is the problem of creation; for in the end the question is: How do I make them _be_? Real activities are those that really make things be, without which the things are not, and with which they are there. Activity, so far as we merely feel it, on the other hand, is only an impression of ours, it may be maintained; and an impression is, for all this way of thinking, only a shadow of another fact.

Arrived at this point, I can do little more than indicate the principles on which, as it seems to me, a radically empirical philosophy is obliged to rely in handling such a dispute.

If there _be_ real creative activities in being, radical empiricism must say, somewhere they must be immediately lived. Somewhere the _that_ of efficacious causing and the _what_ of it must be experienced in one, just as the what and the that of 'cold' are experienced in one whenever a man has the sensation of cold here and now. It boots not to say that our sensations are fallible. They are indeed; but to see the thermometer contradict us when we say 'it is cold' does not abolish cold as a specific nature from the universe. Cold is in the arctic circle if not here. Even so, to feel that our train is moving when the train beside our window moves, to see the moon through a telescope come twice as near, or to see two pictures as one solid when we look through a stereoscope at them, leaves motion, nearness, and solidity still in being--if not here, yet each in its proper seat elsewhere.

And wherever the seat of real causality _is_, as ultimately known 'for true' (in nerve-processes, if you will, that cause our feelings of activity as well as the movements which these seem to prompt), a philosophy of pure experience can consider the real causation as no other _nature_ of thing than that which even in our most erroneous experiences appears to be at work. Exactly what appears there is what we _mean_ by working, though we may later come to learn that working was not exactly _there_. Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying with effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving our intention--this _is_ action, this _is_ effectuation in the only shape in which, by a pure experience-philosophy, the whereabouts of it anywhere can be discussed. Here is creation in its first intention, here is causality at work.[101] To treat this offhand as the bare illusory surface of a world whose real causality is an unimaginable ontological principle hidden in the cubic deeps, is, for the more empirical way of thinking, only animism in another shape. You explain your given fact by your 'principle,' but the principle itself, when you look clearly at it, turns out to be nothing but a previous little spiritual copy of the fact. Away from that one and only kind of fact your mind, considering causality, can never get.[102]

I conclude, then, that real effectual causation as an ultimate nature, as a 'category,' if you like, of reality, is _just what we feel it to be_, just that kind of conjunction which our own activity-series reveal.

We have the whole b.u.t.t and being of it in our hands; and the healthy thing for philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground for what effects effectuation, or what makes action act, and to try to solve the concrete questions of where effectuation in this world is located, of which things are the true causal agents there, and of what the more remote effects consist.

From this point of view the greater sublimity traditionally attributed to the metaphysical inquiry, the grubbing inquiry, entirely disappears.

If we could know what causation really and transcendentally is in itself, the only _use_ of the knowledge would be to help us to recognize an actual cause when we had one, and so to track the future course of operations more intelligently out. The mere abstract inquiry into causation's hidden nature is not more sublime than any other inquiry equally abstract. Causation inhabits no more sublime level than anything else. It lives, apparently, in the dirt of the world as well as in the absolute, or in man's unconquerable mind. The worth and interest of the world consists not in its elements, be these elements things, or be they the conjunctions of things; it exists rather in the dramatic outcome in the whole process, and in the meaning of the succession stages which the elements work out.

My colleague and master, Josiah Royce, in a page of his review of Stout's _a.n.a.lytic Psychology_[103] has some fine words on this point with which I cordially agree. I cannot agree with his separating the notion of efficacy from that of activity altogether (this I understand to be one contention of his) for activities are efficacious whenever they are real activities at all. But the inner nature both of efficacy and of activity are superficial problems, I understand Royce to say; and the only point for us in solving them would be their possible use in helping us to solve the far deeper problem of the course and meaning of the world of life. Life, says our colleague, is full of significance, of meaning, of success and of defeat, of hoping and of striving, of longing, of desire, and of inner value. It is a total presence that embodies worth. To live our own lives better in this presence is the true reason why we wish to know the elements of things; so even we psychologists must end on this pragmatic note.

The urgent problems of activity are thus more concrete. They are all problems of the true relation of longer-span to shorter-span activities.

When, for example, a number of 'ideas' (to use the name traditional in psychology) grow confluent in a larger field of consciousness, do the smaller activities still co-exist with the wider activities then experienced by the conscious subject? And, if so, do the wide activities accompany the narrow ones inertly, or do they exert control? Or do they perhaps utterly supplant and replace them and short-circuit their effects? Again, when a mental activity-process and a brain-cell series of activities both terminate in the same muscular movement, does the mental process steer the neural processes or not? Or, on the other hand, does it independently short-circuit their effects? Such are the questions that we must begin with. But so far am I from suggesting any definitive answer to such questions, that I hardly yet can put them clearly. They lead, however, into that region of panpsychic and ontologic speculation of which Professors Bergson and Strong have lately enlarged the literature in so able and interesting a way.[104] The results of these authors seem in many respects dissimilar, and I understand than as yet but imperfectly; but I cannot help suspecting that the direction of their work is very promising, and that they have the hunter's instinct for the fruitful trails.

FOOTNOTES:

[85] President's Address before the American Psychological a.s.sociation, Philadelphia Meeting, December, 1904. [Reprinted from _The Psychological Review_, vol. XII, No. 1, Jan., 1905. Also reprinted, with some omissions, as Appendix B, _A Pluralistic Universe_, pp. 370-394. Pp.

166-167 have also been reprinted in _Some Problems of Philosophy_, p.

212. The present essay is referred to in _ibid._, p. 219, note. The author's corrections have been adopted for the present text. ED.]

[86] [_The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods._]

[87] _Appearance and Reality_, second edition, pp. 116-117.--Obviously written _at_ Ward, though Ward's name is not mentioned.

[88] [_Mind_, vol. XII, 1887, pp. 573-574.]

[89] _Mind_, N. S., vol. VI, [1897], p. 379.

[90] _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. II, p. 245. One thinks naturally of the peripatetic _actus primus_ and _actus secundus_ here. ["Actus autem est _duplex_: _primus_ et _secundus_. Actus quidem primus est forma, et integritas sei. Actus autem secundus est operatio." Thomas Aquinas: _Summa Theologica_, edition of Leo XIII, (1894), vol. I, p.

391. Cf. also Blanc: _Dictionnaire de Philosophie_, under 'acte.' ED.]

[91] [_Appearance and Reality_, second edition, p. 116.]

[92] [_Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Werke_, (1905), vol. IV, p. 110 (trans. by Max Muller, second edition, p. 128).]

[93] 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 (_a.n.a.lytic Psychology_, book I, chap. VI, and book II, chaps. I, II, and III); as Bradley's (in his long series of a.n.a.lytic articles on Psychology in _Mind_); as t.i.tchener'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 Lipps'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.