Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/184

 170 F. H. BRADLEY I I must direct the attention of the reader to a remaining difficulty. Wherever you experience agency in the proper sense, there you have the experience of volition. Hence, if anywhere you perceived yourself as an agent in the ab- sence of conditions which we have denned as essential to will, such a fact clearly would destroy our definition. Now, if we make no distinction between an awareness of activity and of agency, a contradiction of this kind is likely to arise, and I must therefore offer at once a brief explanation on this point. The question is however too fundamental to be discussed here in an adequate manner. I will begin by noticing a doubt which may be forthwith dismissed. It might be contended that for an experience of activity and passivity it is not necessary to be aware of an other or not-self. But, when the not-self is understood so as to include my existence, so far as that existence is opposed to my idea, an objection of this kind at once loses plausibility. 1 We may therefore, leaving this, return at once to the more serious difficulty. If there is no difference in my experience between activity and agency proper, and if my experience of activity is possible without the presence of an idea of change, then it will not be true that an idea is essential to volition. And I will now proceed to draw out and to explain this objection. " Even when idea is understood," it may be urged, " as you have understood it, 2 I may perceive myself as active where no such idea can be found, or at least where no such idea carries itself out in existence. For I may per- ceive my self as it expands against and into the not-self, or again as it is contracted when the not-self advances into me. And this expansion or contraction may be experienced as my activity or passivity, without the presence in either case of any idea which realises itself. If my self is written as AB and the not-self as CD, we may perhaps at first write their experienced relation as AB | CD. 3 Let us now suppose 1 On this point see above, p. 150. 2 MIND, N.S., No. 40, p. 5, and No. 44, pp. 460-462. 3 These symbols of course are miserably inadequate and may even mislead. I however offer them to the reader who is prepared to make the best of them. The vertical line which divides these groups of letters is of course not to be understood as distinguishing in the or- dinary sense " subject " from " object ". The division holds merely within the content which is experienced in my whole self, and it is meant to distinguish those features in the object-world which oppose and limit me, from the rest of my world, whether object or not, with which in feeling I am one. If we suppose a part of my body which for the moment is out of gear, and so prevents my ordinary feeling and per- ception of self, and if we then suppose that this restriction of myself