Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/673

. 6.] idea of the child's powers of his eye, hand, etc., but attributing to them new capacities to be realized under certain conditions–these conditions, in turn, being simply the new factors which we have now found involved in the activity, though external to it so far as our previous knowledge was concerned. We call any activity capacity, in other words, whenever we first take it abstractly, or at less than its full meaning, and then add to it further relations which we afterwards find involved in it. We first transform our partial conception into a rigid fact, and then, discovering that there is more than the bare fact which we have so far taken into account, we call this broken-off fact capacity for the something more.

To realize capacity does not mean, therefore, to act so as to fill up some presupposed ideal self. It means to act at the height of action, to realize its full meaning. The child realizes his artistic capacity whenever he acts with the completeness of his existing powers. To realize capacity means to act concretely, not abstractly; it is primarily a direction to us with reference to knowledge, not with reference to performance. It means: do not act until you have seen the relations, the content, of your act. It means: let there be for you all the meaning in the act that there could be for any intelligence which saw it in its reality and not abstractly. The whole point is expressed when we say that no possible future activities or conditions have anything to do with the present action except as they enable us to take deeper account of the present activity, to get beyond the mere superficies of the act, to see it in its totality. Indeed, if required to go here into the logic of the matter, I think it could be shown that these future acts and conditions are simply the present act in its mediated content. But, in any case, to realize capacity means to make the special act which has to be performed an activity of the entire present self–so far is it from being one step towards the attainment of a remote ideal self.

One illustration will serve, possibly, to enforce the point practically as well as theoretically. We have to a considerable