The word 'my designates the kind of emphasis.
I see no inconsistency whatever in defending, on the one hand, 'my'
activities as unique and opposed to those of outer nature, and, on the
other hand, in affirming, after introspection, that they consist in
movements in the head. The 'my' of them is the emphasis, the feeling of
perspective-interest in which they are dyed.
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It is evident from this that mere descriptive
analysis of any one of our activity-experiences
is not the whole story, that there is something
170
still to tell _about_ them that has led such able
writers to conceive of a _Simon-pure_ activity,
an activity _an_sich_, that does, and does n't
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merely appear to us to do, and compared with
whose real doing all this phenomenal activity
is but a specious sham.
The metaphysical question opens here; and
I think that the state of mind of one possessed
by it is often something like this: "It is all very
well," we may imagine him saying, "to talk
about certain experience-series taking on the
form of feelings of activity, just as they might
take on musical or geometric forms. Suppose
that they do so; suppose we feel a will to stand
a strain. Does our feeling do more than _record_
the fact that the strain is sustained? The _real_
activity, meanwhile, is the _doing_ of the fact;
and what is the doing made of before the record
is made.
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