S., vol. VI, 1897; cf. pp. 392-393.
188
this presence is the true reason why we wish to
know the elements of things; so even we psychologists
must end on this pragmatic note.
The urgent problems of activity are thus
more concrete. They are all problems of the
true relation of longer-span to shorter-span
activities. When, for example, a number of
'ideas' (to use the name traditional in psychology)
grow confluent in a larger field of
consciousness, do the smaller activities still
co-exist with the wider activities then experienced
by the conscious subject? And, if so,
do the wide activities accompany the narrow
ones inertly, or do they exert control? Or do
they perhaps utterly supplant and replace
them and short-circuit their effects? Again,
when a mental activity-process and a brain-
cell series of activities both terminate in the
same muscular movement, does the mental
process steer the neural processes or not? Or,
on the other hand, does it independently short-
circuit their effects? Such are the questions
that we must begin with. But so far am I from
suggesting any definitive answer to such questions,
189
that I hardly yet can put them clearly.
They lead, however, into that region of pan-
psychic and ontologic speculation of which
Professors Bergson and Strong have lately enlarged
the literature in so able and interesting
a way.
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