What in the will _enables_ it to act thus?
And these trains of experience themselves, in
which activities appear, what makes them _go_
at all? Does the activity in one bit of experience
bring the next bit into being? As an empiricist
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you cannot say so, for you have just
declared activity to be only a kind of synthetic
object, or conjunctive relation experienced between
bits of experience already made. But
what made them at all? What propels experience
_uberhaupt_ into being? _There_ is the activity
that _operates_; the activity _felt_ is only
its superficial sign."
To the metaphysical question, popped upon
us in this way, I must pay serious attention
ere I end my remarks; but, before doing so, let
me show that without leaving the immediate
reticulations of experience, or asking what
makes activity itself act, we still find the distinction
between less real and more real activities
forced upon us, and are driven to much
soul-searching on the purely phenomenal plane.
We must not forget, namely, in talking of
the ultimate character of our activity-experiences,
that each of them is but a portion of a
wider world, one link in the vast chain of processes
of experience out of which history is
made.
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