Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/321

 320 F. H. BEADLEY : a feeling of pleasure, while contraction brings pain, and that we may call these the two chief modes of self-feeling. I must assume all this here and pass over the difficulties which of course beset it. Now the expansion is not the consciousness of activity, nor is it a consciousness of the self or the body or a consciousness of anything at all. It merely is and is felt in a certain way. Not till after a considerable growth of the soul (which we cannot here deal with) does there come the perception of a self and a not-self with what is called consciousness. Then when we get to know from repeated experience that changes ensue upon modes of our self (as a body that is conscious, and later as consciousness along with a body), we acquire the notion of activity or will. We are active when the not-self, consisting in external or internal sensation or perception or idea, changes on the presence of an idea, and (I will add) a desire of that change within the self. This expansion of our area beginning from within gives a certain feeling, and it is interpreted as a putting forth of a something from out the self into the not- self the something being energy or force or will, named in a variety of phrases all equally delusive, and in fact of course being nothing at all. Where the group of the self is con- tracted by the not-self and a pleasant idea of expansion is suggested, there is a feeling of pressure. When in addition the limit of resistance wavers, and the ideal expansion is realised partly, with a further advance of expansion in idea and perhaps an oscillation of actual retreat and actual ad- vance, there is wavering and a consciousness of tension and effort. 1 In all this there is a happening a happening of events ; there is nothing beside facts coexistent and successive, with the result of other facts. And I think in this way we could give throughout psychology a definite meaning to action and passivity. I cannot dwell 011 this outline, but must hasten to consider a point of interest. There is no doubt that in getting from experience (as we must) the idea of self-expansion, the muscular element is most important. But it would be wrong to say that our sense of tension and effort must always come from muscular feeling. In the resistance of an idea that will haunt or escape us, and in the tension of waiting for the issue of a crisis, the origin of the feeling is clearly not muscular. And if it is urged that at any rate the feeling has elements which must have arisen from muscular experience, that, if true, would not be relevant. It would 1 Cp. Wait/, 301 fF.; Xahlowsky, fhfiiM4elf.ii, 80 if.