A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in PhilosophyJames, William
Philosophy
A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy
James, William
Philosophy, Modern
[Footnote 1: _Verborum gratiâ_:'The feeling of activity is not able,
quâ 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_, 2d 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.
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