By the principle of pure experience, either
the word 'activity' must have no meaning at
all, or else the original type and model of what
it means must lie in some concrete kind of
experience that can be definitely pointed out.
Whatever ulterior judgements we may eventually
come to make regarding activity, _that_sort_
of thing will be what the judgements are about.
The first step to take, then, is to ask where in
the stream of experience we seem to find what
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we speak of as activity. What we are to think
of the activity thus found will be a later
question.
Now it is obvious that we are tempted to
affirm activity wherever we find anything
_going_on_. Taken in the broadest sense, any
apprehension of something _doing_, is an experience
of activity. Were our world describable
only by the words 'nothing happening,'
'nothing changing,' 'nothing doing,' we should
unquestionably call it an 'inactive' world.
Bare activity then, as we may call it, means
the bare fact of event or change. 'Change taking
place' is a unique content of experience,
one of those 'conjunctive' objects which radical
empiricism seeks so earnestly to rehabilitate
and preserve. The sense of activity is thus
in the broadest and vaguest way synonymous
with the sense of 'life.
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