Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/409

 G. F. STOUT, Analytic Psychology. 393 conscious life worth living to all of us. Efficacy we do indeed all of us desire in the abstractor scientific sense of causal efficacy ; but not one of us, as natural man amongst men, cares in the least, apart from artificial theological concerns, or from psychological and philosophical theories, whether his causal efficaciousness, in his empirical world, is ever purely psychical, or is always psycho- physical. It is the man, the whole man, body and consciousness together, whose causal efficacy in the sight of gods and men, we desire, in so far as we ever think of that aspect of our nature that science more abstractly defines as our causal aspect. On the other hand, quite within our own consciousness, we do, indeed, in so far, " immediately '' follow with intense interest, our hopes, strivings, ideals, in general our conation, or what our author calls our activity. This " activity," empirically speaking, does normally pass through stages, very much such as our author so well de- fines stages of vagueness, of growing differentiation, of a more definite apperception of our systems of means and ends, and, finally, of the dying away of each particular striving in the attain- ment of its ends. All this any one of normal skill can observe introspectively, for this is what all men are found actually express- ing in speech and in deed, as the sense of their inner life. But now, What is this activity immediately observed to be when viewed through introspection? Causally effective ? If I am right in my definition of causation, that is logically impossible, since introspec- tion cannot observe the genuinely causal conditions and conse- quences of inner states and processes. What then ? I answer that what is introspectively observed is precisely this, that the inner life is normally full of significance, of meaning, of success, and of defeat (as contents of experience, not as cases of causation), of hoping and of the sense of striving, of longing, of desire, yes, and of insight too, of judgment, of conception, of rationality in short of whatever gives consciousness, taken in brief or in long stretches, its inner value, its total presence as something that expresses, embodies and possesses worth and good sense. Now I repeat that consciousness has this directly or immedi- ately teleological quality, this essential meaning, is a fact whose importance seems to me to be rather obscured than illumined by confusing concrete meaning with abstract efficacy, good sense with causal power, rationality with capacity to accomplish the causal production of deeds, and sustained significance with " self- sustaining process". Yet the whole tradition of the partisans of psychological activity seems to me to involve just such a confusion. What the psychologist has a perfect right to say is : That the causal processes which he finds in his essentially psycho-physical world, a world of minds whose inner states are outwardly ex- pressed in physical states and movements, that these causal pro- cesses, I say, are such as to render possible, and (so far as experience indicates the fact) to sustain, precisely those psycho- physical conditions whose inner aspects are significant conscious