Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/67

51 Practically stated, this means that effort is nothing more, and also nothing less, than tension between means and ends in action, and that the sense of effort is the awareness of this conflict. The sensational character of this experience, which has been such a stumbling to some, means that this tension of adjustment is not merely ideal, but is actual (i.e., practical); it is one which goes on in a struggle for existence. Being a struggle for realization in the world of concrete quales and values, it makes itself felt in the only media possible,—specific sensations, on the one hand, and muscular sensations, on the other. Instead of denying, or slurring over, effort, such an account brings it into prominence. Surely what common-sense values in effort, is not some transcendental act, occurring before any change in the actual world of qualities, but precisely this readjustment within the concrete region. And if one is somewhat scandalized at being told that the awareness of effort is a sense of changes of breathing, of muscular tensions, etc., it is not, I conceive, because of what is said, but rather because of what is left unsaid—that these sensations report the state of things as regards effective realization.

It is difficult to see, upon a more analytic consideration than common-sense is called upon to make, what is gained for the 'spiritual' nature of effort by relegating it to a purely extrasensational region. That 'spiritual' is to be so interpreted as to mean existence in a sphere transcending space and time determinations, is, at best, a piece of metaphysics, and not a piece of psychology; and as a piece of metaphysics, it cannot escape competition with the theory which finds the meaning of the spiritual in the whole process of realizing the concrete values of life. I do not find that any of the upholders of the nonsensational quality of effort has ever made a very specific analysis of the experience. Professor Baldwin's account, however, being perhaps the most thoroughgoing statement of effort as preceding sensation, in 'physical' as well as 'spiritual' effort is, perhaps, as explicit as any. In one passage, effort is "distinct consciousness of opposition between what we call self and muscular resistance." Now a consciousness of