Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/380

 ASSOCIATION AND THOUGHT. 367 that may lead to the explanation of a doctrine which assuredly needs one, and which, from the character of its advocates, cannot be ignored. 1 We have so far concluded that in the beginning there is neither a subject nor an object, nor an activity, nor a faculty of any kind whatever. There is nothing beyond presentation which has two sides, sensation and pleasure and pain. And for the mind there is no discretion, or even discrimination. All is feeling in the sense, not of pleasure and pain, but of a whole given without relations, and given therefore as one with its own pain and pleasure. So far as it is possible to experience this after contrast has done its work, we do so most of all in organic sensation. From this basis, the machinery we went through above has to bring out subject and object, volition and thought. I am entering ground that should now be more familiar, and shall hence advance very rapidly. The first point we have to notice is the formation of groups. The condition of this is that in the flux of sensations there should be regularities. Without some identity in the given our ex- perience could not start, and no Ego or faculty could give us any help. These groups will consist mainly of the sensations 1 The appearance of Mr. Ward's article in MIND No. 45 since this was written, has not led me to modify it ; but I will add a few words. Mr. Ward appears to me hardly sufficiently alive to the necessity of denning a term like " activity ". If " activity " were wholly simple, then, of course, it could not be denned, but only pointed out. The question is, however, first, whether such a simple element does exist, and next, whether, if so, it answers to what we call activity. But Mr. Ward, I gather (MiND No. 45, p. 66), considers that activity contains a relation. If so, I would invite him to say more explicitly whether the terms of the relation are psychical facts, in the sense of being immediately experienced, and having quality, duration and intensity or, if not that, what else they are. If Mr. Ward will do this, he will, 1 think, be convinced that the question is about more than words. I may be allowed to add that the question is hardly so much about the reality of activity as about its nature ; and that my contention is hardly (as suggested on p. 66) that, because our perception of activity is composite now, therefore in attention there cannot be an unanalysable element. Activity has, it seems to me, a complex meaning now, and I have tried to show the psychical development of this com- plexity. Let that derivation be false and my contention is still this Activity in its general use seems to have some meaning, and the man who uses it in psychology is bound first to say with what meaning he uses it. If he makes it an original constituent he is none the less called upon to state its content ; or if he holds that it admits of no more than bare pointing out, he is bound to state this explicitly. And, in the second place, he should say why he applies to this unanalysable element the term Activity rather than any other word. Meanwhile I feel called upon to repeat that in general the present way of treating this word is little better than a scandal.