Merely to feel active
is not to be active, in their sight. The agents
that appear in the experience are not real
agents, the resistances do not really resist, the
effects that appear are not really affects at all.(1)
---
1 _Verborum_gratia_: "The feeling of activity is not able, _qua_
feeling, to tell us anything about activity" (Loveday: _Mind_, N.S.,
vol, X, [1901], p. 463; "A sensation or feeling or sense of activity ...
is not, looked at in another way, an experience _of_ activity at all.
It is a mere sensation shut up within which you could by no reflection
get the idea of activity. . . . Whether this experience is or is not
later on a character essential to our perception and our idea of
activity, it, as it comes first, is only so for extraneous reasons and
only so for an outside observer" (Bradley, _Appearance_and_Reality_,
second edition, p.605); "In dem Tatigkeitsgefuhle liegt an sich nicht
der geringste Beweis fur das Vorhandesein einer psychischen Tatigkeit"
(Munsterberg: _Grundzuge_der_Psychologie_). I could multiply similar
quotations and would have introduced some of them into my text to make
it more concrete, save that the mingling of different points of view in
most of these author's discussions (not in Munsterberg's) make it
impossible to disentangle exactly what they mean.
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