Now it is obvious that we are tempted to affirm activity wherever we find anything going on.  Taken in the broadest sense, any apprehension of something doing, is an experience of activity.  Were our world describable only by the words ‘nothing happening,’ ’nothing changing,’ ‘nothing doing,’ we should unquestionably call it an ‘inactive’ world.  Bare activity, then, as we may call it, means the bare fact of event or change.  ‘Change taking place’ is a unique content of experience, one of those ‘conjunctive’ objects which radical empiricism seeks so earnestly to rehabilitate and preserve.  The sense of activity is thus in the broadest and vaguest way synonymous with the sense of ‘life.’  We should feel our own subjective life at least, even in noticing and proclaiming an otherwise inactive world.  Our own reaction on its monotony would be the one thing experienced there in the form of something coming to pass.

This seems to be what certain writers have in mind when they insist that for an experient to be at all is to be active.  It seems to justify, or at any rate to explain, Mr. Ward’s expression that we are only as we are active,[1]

[Footnote 1:  Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii, p. 245.  One thinks naturally of the peripatetic actus primus and actus secundus here.]

for we are only as experients; and it rules out Mr. Bradley’s contention that ’there is no original experience of anything like activity.’  What we ought to say about activities thus simply given, whose they are, what they effect, or whether indeed they effect anything at all—­these are later questions, to be answered only when the field of experience is enlarged.

Bare activity would thus be predicable, though there were no definite direction, no actor, and no aim.  Mere restless zigzag movement, or a wild ideenflucht, or rhapsodie der wahrnehmungen, as Kant would say, would constitute an active as distinguished from an inactive world.

But in this actual world of ours, as it is given, a part at least of the activity comes with definite direction; it comes with desire and sense of goal; it comes complicated with resistances which it overcomes or succumbs to, and with the efforts which the feeling of resistance so often provokes; and it is in complex experiences like these that the notions of distinct agents, and of passivity as opposed to activity arise.  Here also the notion of causal efficacy comes to birth.  Perhaps the most elaborate work ever done in descriptive psychology has been the analysis by various recent writers of the more complex activity-situations.  In their descriptions, exquisitely subtle some of them,[1] the activity appears as the gestalt-qualitaet

[Footnote 1:  Their existence forms a curious commentary on Professor Munsterberg’s dogma that will-attitudes are not describable.  He himself has contributed in a superior way to their description, both in his Willenshandlung, and in his Grundzuege, Part II, chap, ix, Sec. 7.]