Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/271

 .IAMKS WARI>, tititnilisin and Agnosticism. 257 as it would be for a completed science the same thing as the world as it conceivably is for a consciousness to which the whole of experience is immediately present? Or yet again, can scientific truth and real fact ever be ultimately one and the same thing? This question seems of the highest philosophical importance, be- cause if we answer it in the negative, we shall be driven to face the possibility that the whole of our conceptual scheme, including the categories of activity and casuality to which Prof. Ward is so deeply attached, may turn out to be mere " working hypothesis," convenient in the special sciences but incapable of being intelligibly predicated of experienced reality as a whole. And indeed I am not sure that there is not some case for adopting this view of the category of activity. In the penultimate lecture of the series Prof. Ward argues strongly against Mr. Bradley for the ultimate validity of the concept of " activity " as an essential characteristic of mind. His arguments, however, do not seem to be conclusive and even perhaps betray some confusion as to the issue at stake. The question, I take it, is not whether we cannot be said to be more " active " in some mental states than in others, and thus whether "activity" may not be a valid " working hypothesis" in psychology, but whether "activity " can be made into an ultimate metaphysi- cal category without self-contradiction. Only those who are pre- pared to maintain that psychology alone among the sciences can do its work without convenient but self-contradictory working hypotheses are entitled to treat these two questions as one. Now it is by no means clear to which of these two very different issues Prof. Ward is addressing himself in his polemic. When he tells us that the question is not one of " conceivability but of fact " (p. 243) he seems to be dealing with activity as a working hypothesis for psychology, for of course all questions as to the ultimate applicability of our categories to the fundamental reality of the universe are questions of conceivability. On the other hand, the tone of the pages which immediately follow, as well as of all the references to causality in the second volume, seem to indicate that Prof. Ward means to assert that ' ' activity ' ' is something more than a convenient " working hypothesis," that it is predicable with final and ultimate truth of the mind, which is, for him, the ultimate reality. If this is his meaning, I would suggest the fol- lowing difficulty. Activity in the sense in which we use the word of ourselves always seems to imply an environment capable of resisting our demands upon it. We complain of being " passive '' in the presence of nature and natural forces when we cannot bend them to our purposes but have to adapt ourselves to them ; we say we are " active " on the other hand just in so far as we force the environment to mould itself in accordance with our subjective ends. Thus our own consciousness of activity seems to be con- ditioned partly by a physical environment which seems capable of resisting our purposes, partly by a social environment of other minds with plans of their own which conflict with ours. Now, if 17