sich nicht der geringste beweis fuer das vorhandensein
einer psychischen taetigkeit’ (Muensterberg:
Grundzuege, etc., p. 67). I could
multiply similar quotations, and would have introduced
some of them into my text to make it more concrete,
save that the mingling of different points of view
in most of these author’s discussions (not in
Muensterberg’s) make it impossible to disentangle
exactly what they mean. I am sure in any case
to be accused of misrepresenting them totally, even
in this note, by omission of the context, so the less
I name names and the more I stick to abstract characterization
of a merely possible style of opinion, the safer it
will be. And apropos of misunderstandings, I may
add to this note a complaint on my own account.
Professor Stout, in the excellent chapter on ‘Mental
Activity,’ in vol. i of his Analytic Psychology,
takes me to task for identifying spiritual activity
with certain muscular feelings, and gives quotations
to bear him out. They are from certain paragraphs
on ‘the Self,’ in which my attempt was
to show what the central nucleus of the activities
that we call ‘ours’ is. I found it
in certain intracephalic movements which we habitually
oppose, as ‘subjective,’ to the activities
of the transcorporeal world. I sought to show
that there is no direct evidence that we feel the
activity of an inner spiritual agent as such (I should
now say the activity of ‘consciousness’
as such, see my paper ’Does consciousness exist?’
in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. i, p. 477).
There are, in fact, three distinguishable ‘activities’
in the field of discussion: the elementary activity
involved in the mere that of experience, in
the fact that something is going on, and the
farther specification of this something into
two whats, an activity felt as ‘ours,’
and an activity ascribed to objects. Stout, as
I apprehend him, identifies ‘our’ activity
with that of the total experience-process, and when
I circumscribe it as a part thereof, accuses me of
treating it as a sort of external appendage to itself
(pp. 162-163), as if I ’separated the activity
from the process which is active.’ But all
the processes in question are active, and their activity
is inseparable from their being. My book raised
only the question of which activity deserved
the name of ‘ours.’ So far as we are
‘persons,’ and contrasted and opposed
to an ‘environment,’ movements in our body
figure as our activities; and I am unable to find
any other activities that are ours in this strictly
personal sense. There is a wider sense in which
the whole ‘choir of heaven and furniture of the
earth,’ and their activities, are ours, for
they are our ‘objects.’ But ‘we’
are here only another name for the total process of
experience, another name for all that is, in fact;
and I was dealing with the personal and individualized
self exclusively in the passages with which Professor
Stout finds fault.