To the metaphysical question, popped upon us in this way, I must pay serious attention ere I end my remarks, but, before doing so, let me show that without leaving the immediate reticulations of experience, or asking what makes activity itself act, we still find the distinction between less real and more real activities forced upon us, and are driven to much soul-searching on the purely phenomenal plane.

We must not forget, namely, in talking of the ultimate character of our activity-experiences, that each of them is but a portion of a wider world, one link in the vast chain of processes of experience out of which history is made.  Each partial process, to him who lives through it, defines itself by its origin and its goal; but to an observer with a wider mind-span who should live outside of it, that goal would appear but as a provisional halting-place, and the subjectively felt activity would be seen to continue into objective activities that led far beyond.  We thus acquire a habit, in discussing activity-experiences, of defining them by their relation to something more.  If an experience be one of narrow span, it will be mistaken as to what activity it is and whose.  You think that you are acting while you are only obeying some one’s push.  You think you are doing this, but you are doing something of which you do not dream.  For instance, you think you are but drinking this glass; but you are really creating the liver-cirrhosis that will end your days.  You think you are just driving this bargain, but, as Stevenson says somewhere, you are laying down a link in the policy of mankind.

Generally speaking, the onlooker, with his wider field of vision, regards the ultimate outcome of an activity as what it is more really doing; and the most previous agent ascertainable, being the first source of action, he regards as the most real agent in the field.  The others but transmit that agent’s impulse; on him we put responsibility; we name him when one asks us, ‘Who’s to blame?’

But the most previous agents ascertainable, instead of being of longer span, are often of much shorter span than the activity in view.  Brain-cells are our best example.  My brain-cells are believed to excite each other from next to next (by contiguous transmission of katabolic alteration, let us say), and to have been doing so long before this present stretch of lecturing-activity on my part began.  If any one cell-group stops its activity, the lecturing will cease or show disorder of form. Cessante causa, cessat et effectus—­does not this look as if the short-span brain activities were the more real activities, and the lecturing activities on my part only their effects?  Moreover, as Hume so clearly pointed out, in my mental activity-situation the words physically to be uttered are represented as the activity’s immediate goal.  These words, however, cannot be uttered without intermediate physical processes in the bulb and vagi nerves, which processes nevertheless fail to figure in the mental activity-series at all.  That series, therefore, since it leaves out vitally real steps of action, cannot represent the real activities.  It is something purely subjective; the facts of activity are elsewhere.  They are something far more interstitial, so to speak, than what my feelings record.