Page:Appearance and Reality (1916).djvu/625

 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 any one 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