Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/585

 572 J. WARD : looks to his last article (in No. 47) to clear up what he thinks I misunderstood before. That I do not understand Mr. Brad- ley's analysis I fully admit ; but I do not believe I have so completely misunderstood it as to exclude my remarks from all claim to consideration. However, as the point is impor- tant, I will try, now that I have compared both articles, to restate the particular objection more clearly. Mr. Bradley is showing how the idea of activity originates. It is brought out of a certain basis by means of a certain machinery. Of this basis it is hard to get a clear account. On p. 365 it is " a whole that expands and contracts, and feels pleasure and pain ". On p. 367 it is "a whole given without relations [' given ' we must remember = * is simply '] and given therefore as one with its own pleasure and pain ". On the former page we are told that pleasure and pain are presentations, and on the latter that " presentation has two sides, sensation and pleasure and pain ". In the account of the machinery there is a like con- fusion. After describing the working of association in the "im- proved " form, Mr. Bradley continues: " Turning now from these conditions to one not mechanical, though hardly ideal, we reach the influence of pleasure and pain. That these work seems certain, but the way ... is still matter of controversy, and I shall pass it by ! " Now, it makes all the difference in the world whether pleasure and pain, like intensity, duration, &c., are sides or aspects of every presentation, or pertain only to the whole that expands and contracts and which is said to feel. Further, if pleasure and pain work in a way not mechanical, we ought surely to have some general notion what this way is, especially if they belong to the whole that feels, rather than to the elements that struggle about company, and whose collisions are said to " cause pain and unrest " (p. 360). However, in spite of this initial obscurity, Mr. Bradley 's exposition will be more lucid as we go on. Certain sensations, which continue to be one with pleasure and pain, become closely united into a "feeling-mass " : from this the other groups in which the feeling-aspects have been loosened by repeated collisions become dissociated and contrasted. Supposing the primitive correlated whole resolvable into I and O (inner and outer), we may say then that we have now I + F set over against - F, the group that has kept its feeling-aspect and the rest that have lost theirs. And now the idea of activity is about to emerge. But let us, to be sure there is no conjuring, note once more : (1) that the only materials are I + F (or some Eresentations it may contain) and O - F (with, in like manner, its itent differentiations) ; (2) that these and their constituents are ever struggling towards an independent totality, this striving of every mental element being the only active principle that is even tacitly admitted ; and (3) that the laws of its working (coalescence, redintegration, &c.) are the machinery we are expected to under- stand. It is altogether a singular inventory for a psychologist