In distinction from it as it is for an outside observer,

or for the soul later on? is exactly the question to

which I failed throughout to get an intelligible reply.

And if I myself in any place was blind to these

distinctions--distinctions familiar even to the cursory

reader of Hegel--that place has not yet been shown to

me. But instead of going back on the past I will try at

least to be explicit here.

(i) A man may take the view that there is an original

experience of activity the content of which is complex

and holds that which, when analyzed by reflection,

becomes our developed idea of activity. Without of

course venturing to say that this view is certainly

false, I submit that we have no reason to believe it to

be true.

(ii) A man may hold that we have an original

experience which is not in itself complex nor has any

Internal diversity in its content. This experience, he

may further hold, goes with (a) some or (b) all of those

conditions, physical or psychical, which an outside

observer would or might call an active state, and which

the soul itself later would or might call so. And he may

go on to maintain that this sensation or feeling (or

call it what you will) is the differential condition,

without the real or supposed presence of which no state,

or no psychical state, would be called active at all.

Now this second doctrine is to my mind radically

different from the first. Its truth or falsehood to my

mind is an affair not of principle but of detail. Nay,

to some extent and up to a certain point, I think it

very probably is true. Why should there not be a

sensation going with e.g. muscular contraction, or even

possibly with what we may call the explosion of a

psychical disposition? Why should this sensation not

always colour our perception of activity (when we get

it), so that without this sensation the perception would

be something different, something that would fail, I

will not say essentially in being what we call activity,

but fail so far that we might no longer recognize it as

being the same thing? This, so far as I see, may all be

true to an extent which I do not discuss; and the same

thing may hold good mutatis mutandis about passivity.

But on this comes a distinction--the distinction

which Mr. Stout says that I have overlooked, and which I

on the contrary claim to have preached in vain--the

distinction between the psychical fact itself and what

that becomes for reflection. A sensation or feeling or

sense of activity, as we have just described it, is not,

looked at in another way, an experience of activity at

all. If you keep to it it tells you nothing, just as

pleasure and pain, I should add, tell you nothing. It is

a mere sensation shut up within which you could by no

reflection get the idea of activity. For that is

complex, while within the sensation there is given no

diversity of aspects, such as could by reflection be

developed into terms and relations. And therefore this

experience would differ, I presume, from an original

sense of time, which I may in passing remark is neither

asserted nor denied on page 206 of my book. It would

differ because such a sense of time has, I understand,

from the first in its content an internal diversity,

while diversity is absent from the experience of

activity, as we now are considering it. In short whether

this experience is or is not later on a character

essential to our perception and our idea of activity,

it, as it comes first, is not in itself an experience of

activity at all. It, as it comes first, is only so for

extraneous reasons and only so for an outside observer.

This is all I think it well to say here on the head

of confusion. But, before proceeding to consider the

charge of inconsistency brought against me, I will

venture to ask a question of the reader. Can any one

tell me where I can find an experimental enquiry into

the particular conditions under which in fact we feel

ourselves to be active or passive? I find, for instance,

Mr. Stout stating here and there as experienced facts

what I for one am certainly not able to find in my

experience. And if anyone could direct me to an

investigation of this subject, I should be grateful. I

am forced at present to remain in doubt about much of

the observed facts. I am led even to wonder whether we

have here a difference only in the observations or in

the observers also, a difference, that is, in the actual

facts as they exist diversely in various subjects.

I will turn now to the special charge of

inconsistency. For activity I take the presence of an

idea to be necessary, and I point out then that in some

cases there is not what would be commonly called an

idea. But I go on to distinguish between an idea which

is explicit and one which is not so. Now certainly, if

by this I had meant that an idea was not actually

present but was present merely somehow potentially, I

should have merely covered a failure in thought by a

phrase, and Mr. Stout's censure would have been just.

But my meaning was on the contrary that an idea is

always present actually, though an idea which many

persons (in my opinion wrongly) would not call an idea.

Many persons would refuse to speak of an idea unless

they had something separated in its existence from a

sensation, and based on an image or something else, the

existence of which is distinguished from the existence

of the sensation. And this separated idea I called

(perhaps foolishly) an explicit idea, and I opposed it

to the idea which is a mere qualification of sensation

or perception--a qualification inconsistent with that

sensation as existing, and yet possessed of no other

psychical existence, such as that of an image or (as

some perhaps may add) of a mere word. And I referred to

a discussion with regard to the presence of an idea in

Desire, where the same distinction was made. This distinction I would remark

further is in my judgment essentially required for the

theory of reasoning, and indeed for a just view as to

any aspect of the mind. And, not being originated by me

at all, much less was it invented specially for the sake

of saving any doctrine of mine about the nature of

activity.

Let us take the instance, given by Mr. Stout, of a

child or other young animal desiring milk. The

perception, visual and otherwise, of the breast or teat

suggests the sucking, but that sucking I take to qualify

the perception and not to be an image apart. The breast

becomes by ideal suggestion the breast sucked, while on

the other hand by some failure of adjustment the breast

is not sucked in fact. The perceived breast is therefore

at once qualified doubly and inconsistently with itself,

and the self of the animal also is qualified doubly and

inconsistently. That self is both expanded by ideal

success and contracted by actual failure in respect of

one point, i.e. the sucking. And so far as the

expansion, under the whole of the above conditions,

becomes actual, we get the sense of activity. And there

actually is an idea present here, though there is no

image nor anything that could properly be called

forethought.

Or take a dog who, coming to some grassy place,

begins to run and feels himself to be active. Where is

here the idea? It might be said that there is none,

because there is no forethought nor any image. But this

in my opinion would be an error, an error fatal to any

sound theory of the mind. And I will briefly point out

where the idea lies, without of course attempting to

analyze fully the dog's complex state. The ground in

front of the dog is a perception qualified on the one

hand, not by images, but by an enlargement of its

content so as to become "ground run over." It comes to

the dog therefore at once as both "run over" and "not."

And the "run over" is ideal, though it is not an

explicit idea or a forethought or in any sense a

separate image. Again the dog comes to himself as

qualified by an actual running, supplemented by an ideal

running over what is seen in front of him. In his soul

is a triumphant process of ideal expansion passing over

unbrokenly into actual fruition, the negative perception

of the ground as "not run over" serving only as the

vanishing condition of a sense of activity with no cloud

or check of failure. This is what I meant by an idea

which is not explicit, nor, except that the name is

perhaps a bad one, do I see anything in it deserving

censure. I should perhaps have done better to have used

no name at all. But the distinction itself, I must

repeat, is throughout every aspect of mind of vital

importance.

But that I failed to be clear is evident, both from

Mr. Stout's criticism and also from some interesting

remarks by Professor Baldwin in the Psychological

Review, Vol. 1, No. 6. The relation of felt activity to

desire, and the possibility of their independence and of

the priority of one to the other, is to my mind a very

difficult question, but I should add that to my mind it

is not a very important one. I hope that both Mr. Stout

and Professor Baldwin will see from the above that my

failure was to some extent one merely of expression, and

that our respective divergence is not as great as at

first sight it might appear to be. As to the absence of

felt self-activity in certain states of mind I may add

that I am wholly and entirely at one with Professor

Baldwin.

The above remarks are offered mainly as a defence

against the charge of inconsistency, and not as a proof

that the view I take of activity and of passivity is in

general true. I must hope, in spite of many

disappointments, to address myself at some time

elsewhere to a further discussion of the perception no

less of passivity than of activity. [See now Mind,

Nos. 40, 41 and 46.]

p. 143. I have in this edition re-written pp. 141-3,

since their statement was in some points wanting in

clearness. The objection, indicated in the text, which

would refute the plurality of reals by an argument drawn

from the fact of knowledge, may be stated here briefly

and in outline.

The Many not only are independent but ex hyp. are

also known to be so; and these two characters of the

Many seem incompatible. Knowledge must somehow be a

state of one or more of the Many, a state in which they

are known to be plural; for except in the Many where can

we suppose that any knowledge falls? Even if relations

are taken to exist somehow outside of the Many, the

attempt to make knowledge fall merely in these relations

leads to insoluble difficulties. And here, since the

Many are taken to be the sole reality, such an attempt

at escape is precluded. The knowledge therefore must

fall somehow within the reals.

Now if the knowledge of each singly fell in each

severally, each for itself would be the world, and there

could nowhere be any knowledge of the many reals. But