' We should feel our
own subjective life at least, even in noticing
and proclaiming an otherwise inactive world.
Our own reaction on its monotony would be
the one thing experienced there in the form of
something coming to pass.
162
This seems to be what certain writers have
in mind when they insist that for an experient
to be at all is to be active. It seems to justify,
or at any rate to explain, Mr. Ward's expression
that we _are_ only as we are active,(1) for
we _are_ only as experients; and it rules out Mr.
Bradley's contention that "there is no original
experience of anything like activity."(2) What
we ought to say about activities thus elementary,
whose they are, what they effect, or
whether indeed they effect anything at all --
these are later questions, to be answered only
when the field of experience is enlarged.
Bare activity would thus be predicable,
though there were no definite direction, no
actor, and no aim. Mere restless zigzag movement,
or a wild _Ideenflucht_, or _Rhapsodie_der_
_Wharnehmungen_, as Kant would say,(2) would
---
1 _Naturalism_and_Agnosticism_, vol. II, p.245. One thinks naturally
of the peripatetic _actus_primus_ and _actus_secundus_ here.
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