Their existence forms a curious commentary on Professor Münsterberg’s dogma that will-attitudes are not describable. He himself has contributed in a superior way to their description, both in his Willenshandlung, and in his Grundzüge, Part II, chap. IX, § 7. ↩
I ought myself to cry peccavi, having been a voluminous sinner in my own chapter on the will. ↩
Verborum gratiâ: “The feeling of activity is not able, qua feeling, to tell us anything about activity” (Loveday: Mind, N.S., X., 403); “A sensation or feeling or sense of activity … is not, looked at in another way, a feeling of activity at all. It is a mere sensation shut up within which you could by no reflection get the idea of activity. … Whether this experience is or is not later on a character essential to our perception and our idea of activity, it, as it comes first, is not in itself an experience of activity at all. It, as it comes first, is only so for extraneous reasons and only so for an outside observer” (Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 2nd edition, p. 605); “In dem tätigkeitsgefühle leigt an sich nicht der geringste beweis für das vorhandensein einer psychischen tätigkeit” (Münsterberg: Grundzüge, etc., p. 67). I could multiply similar quotations, and would have introduced some of them into my text to make it more concrete, save that the mingling of different points of view in most of these author’s discussions (not in Münsterberg’s) make it impossible to disentangle exactly what they mean. I am sure in any case to be accused of misrepresenting them totally, even in this note, by omission of the context, so the less I name names and the more I stick to abstract characterization of a merely possible style of opinion, the safer it will be. And apropos of misunderstandings, I may add to this note a complaint on my own account. Professor Stout, in the excellent chapter on “Mental Activity,” in vol. I of his Analytic Psychology, takes me to task for identifying spiritual activity with certain muscular feelings, and gives quotations to bear him out. They are from certain paragraphs on “the Self,” in which my attempt was to show what the central nucleus of the activities that we call “ours” is. I found it in certain intracephalic movements which we habitually oppose, as “subjective,” to the activities of the transcorporeal world. I sought to show that there is no direct evidence that we feel the activity of an inner spiritual agent as such (I should now say the activity of “consciousness” as such, see my paper “Does Consciousness Exist?” in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. I, p. 477). There are, in fact, three distinguishable “activities” in the field of discussion: the elementary activity involved in the mere that of experience, in the fact that something is going on, and the farther specification of this something into two whats, an activity felt as “ours,” and an activity ascribed to objects. Stout, as I apprehend him, identifies “our” activity with that of the total experience-process, and when I circumscribe it as a part thereof, accuses me of treating it as a sort of external appendage to itself (pp. 162–163), as if I “separated the activity from the process which is active.” But all the processes in question are active, and their activity is inseparable from their being. My book raised only the question of which activity deserved the name of “ours.” So far as we are “persons,” and contrasted and opposed to an “environment,” movements in our body figure as our activities; and I am unable to find any other activities that are ours in this strictly personal sense. There is a wider sense in which the whole “choir of heaven and furniture of the earth,” and their activities, are ours, for they are our “objects.” But “we” are here only another name for the total process of experience, another name for all that is, in fact; and I was dealing with the personal and individualized self exclusively in the passages with which Professor Stout finds fault.
The individualized self, which I believe to be the only thing properly called self, is a part of the content of the world experienced. The world experienced (otherwise called the “field of consciousness”) comes at all times with our body as its centre, centre of vision, centre of action, centre of interest. Where the body is is “here”; when the body acts is “now”; what the body touches is “this”; all other things are “there” and “then” and “that.” These words of emphasized position imply a systematization of things with reference to a focus of action and interest which lies in the body; and the systematization is now so instinctive (was it ever not so?) that no developed or active experience exists for us at all except in that ordered form. So far as “thoughts” and “feelings” can be active, their activity terminates in the activity of the body, and only through first arousing its activities can they begin to change those of the rest of the world. The body is the storm centre, the origin of coordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience-train. Everything circles round it, and is felt from its point of view. The word “I,” then, is primarily a noun of position, just like “this” and “here.” Activities attached to “this” position have prerogative emphasis, and, if activities have feelings, must be felt in a peculiar way. The word “my” designates the kind of emphasis. I see no inconsistency whatever in defending, on the one hand, “my” activities as unique and opposed to those of outer
