APPENDIX B
THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY[1]
… 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. Ward: 'I do not care what your oracle is, and your preposterous 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.'[2] 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 travesty of Herbartian Psychology by one who has tried to improve upon it without being at the pains to master it.' Münsterberg excludes a view opposed to his own by saying that with any one who holds it a verständigung with him is 'grundsätzlich ausgeschlossen'; and Royce,
[Footnote 1: President's Address before the American Psychological
Association, December, 1904. Reprinted from the Psychological
Review, vol. xii, 1905, with slight verbal revision.]
[Footnote 2: Appearance and Reality, p. 117. Obviously written at
Ward, though Ward's name is not mentioned.]
in a review of Stout,[1] 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 Stout himself say was quite foreign to the intention of his text.
In these discussions distinct questions are habitually jumbled 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 solely? 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 mere description of the surface-show of experience is proffered as if it implicitly 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 triumphant.