involve.  He goes through all that ever can be imagined where activity is supposed.  If we suppose activities to go on outside of our experience, it is in forms like these that we must suppose them, or else give them some other name; for the word ‘activity’ has no imaginable content whatever save these experiences of process, obstruction, striving, strain, or release, ultimate qualia as they are of the life given us to be known.

Were this the end of the matter, one might think that whenever we had successfully lived through an activity-situation we should have to be permitted, without provoking contradiction, to say that we had been really active, that we had met real resistance and had really prevailed.  Lotze somewhere says that to be an entity all that is necessary is to gelten as an entity, to operate, or be felt, experienced, recognized, or in any way realized, as such.  In our activity-experiences the activity assuredly fulfils Lotze’s demand.  It makes itself gelten.  It is witnessed at its work.  No matter what activities there may really be in this extraordinary universe of ours, it is impossible for us to conceive of any one of them being either lived through or authentically known otherwise than in this dramatic shape of something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles and overcoming or being overcome.  What ‘sustaining’ means here is clear to any one who has lived through the experience, but to no one else; just as ‘loud,’ ‘red,’ ‘sweet,’ mean something only to beings with ears, eyes, and tongues.  The percipi in these originals of experience is the esse; the curtain is the picture.  If there is anything hiding in the background, it ought not to be called activity, but should get itself another name.

This seems so obviously true that one might well experience astonishment at finding so many of the ablest writers on the subject flatly denying that the activity we live through in these situations is real.  Merely to feel active is not to be active, in their sight.  The agents that appear in the experience are not real agents, the resistances do not really resist, the effects that appear are not really effects at all.[1] It is evident from this that

[Footnote 1:  Verborum gratia:’The feeling of activity is not able, qua feeling, to tell us anything about activity’ (Loveday:  Mind, N.S., X., 403); ’A sensation or feeling or sense of activity ... is not, looked at in another way, a feeling of activity at all.  It is a mere sensation shut up within which you could by no reflection get the idea of activity....  Whether this experience is or is not later on a character essential to our perception and our idea of activity, it, as it comes first, is not in itself an experience of activity at all.  It, as it comes first, is only so for extraneous reasons and only so for an outside observer’ (Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 2d edition, p. 605); ’In dem taetigkeitsgefuehle leigt an