Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/320

 IS THERE ANY SPECIAL ACTIVITY OF ATTENTION ? 319 example, given certain ideas, certain internal sensations follow upon them is an open question ; and it is an open question, when those sensations have followed, what part of this mass of sensations and ideas and feelings is the actual emotion. I have not to resolve these doubts, but am to point out conditions through which we get, and without which we should not get, the feeling of activity. This last phrase recalls a shocking ambiguity. A ' feeling of has at least three different senses. It means feeling simply felt, and that never as yet has been interpreted by and combined with ideas, or feeling recognised as that which is of something else, or feeling not now recognised but modified by the results of past recognition. In the first of these cases the ' of ' does not belong to the feeling. It belongs solely to an outsider who adds ideas true or false, but in either case derived from other experience. And to predicate these ideas directly ' of ' the feeling is a serious error. Now if we take activity at the stage where it is recognised and is felt as such, we can see at once its composite character. It contains the idea of myself chang- ing something opposed, and it contains still more. If I suffered a change from which something else followed, that by itself would not be taken as activity. The change must come from me, that is, I must have an idea of it (if not also a desire), and this idea, or end, must lead to the change. Now I think no one can deny that to be conscious of all this is possible only through a liberal interpretation of much experience. But on the other hand what sense, when these constituents are removed, is left to my consciousness of energy put forth? If there is a feeling which goes now together with this complex and has gone before it, that feeling is of energy in much the same manner in which relief from the pains of hunger and cold is a feeling of swaddling clothes and of milk, or a metaphysical proof of their absolute reality. But what is the feeling which becomes by experience the feeling of activity ? Or for the present let us ask what are its conditions. I think its origin lies in the feeling of expansion that follows upon the enlargement of the self. I have to assume the doctrine that of our psychical contents a certain group is closely united, and is connected in a very special manner with pleasure and pain, and that this group is the first appearance of our self. I have to assume again that this psychical mass, with its connexions, is perpetually growing larger and smaller as against other elements. And I must assume once more that the expansion gives in general