If we take an activity-situation at its
face-value, it seems as if we caught _in_flagrante_
_delicto_ the very power that makes facts come
and be. I now am eagerly striving, for example,
to get this truth which I seem half to
perceive, into words which shall make it show
more clearly. If the words come, it will seem as
if the striving itself had drawn or pulled them
into actuality out from the state of merely
possible being in which they were. How is this
feat performed? How does the pulling _pull?_
How do I get my hold on words not yet existent,
and when they come by what means have
I _made_ them come? Really it is the problem of
creation; for in the end the question is: How do
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I make them _be?_ Real activities are those
that really make things be, without which
the things are not, and with which they are
there. Activity, so far as we merely feel it, on
the other hand, is only an impression of ours,
it may be maintained; and an impression is,
for all this way of thinking, only a shadow of
another fact.
Arrived at this point, I can do little more
than indicate the principles on which, as it
seems to me, a radically empirical philosophy
is obliged to rely in handling such a dispute.
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