The like is true if nerve-cells be the agents.  The activity of a nerve-cell must be conceived of as a tendency of exceedingly short reach, an ‘impulse’ barely spanning the way to the next cell—­for surely that amount of actual ‘process’ must be ‘experienced’ by the cells if what happens between them is to deserve the name of activity at all.  But here again the gross resultant, as I perceive it, is indifferent to the agents, and neither wished or willed or foreseen.  Their being agents now congruous with my will gives me no guarantee that like results will recur again from their activity.  In point of fact, all sorts of other results do occur.  My mistakes, impotencies, perversions, mental obstructions, and frustrations generally, are also results of the activity of cells.  Altho these are letting me lecture now, on other occasions they make me do things that I would willingly not do.

The question Whose is the real activity? is thus tantamount to the question What will be the actual results? Its interest is dramatic; how will things work out?  If the agents are of one sort, one way; if of another sort, they may work out very differently.  The pragmatic meaning of the various alternatives, in short, is great.  It makes more than a merely verbal difference which opinion we take up.

You see it is the old dispute come back!  Materialism and teleology; elementary short-span actions summing themselves ‘blindly,’ or far foreseen ideals coming with effort into act.

Naively we believe, and humanly and dramatically we like to believe, that activities both of wider and of narrower span are at work in life together, that both are real, and that the long-span tendencies yoke the others in their service, encouraging them in the right direction, and damping them when they tend in other ways.  But how to represent clearly the modus operandi of such steering of small tendencies by large ones is a problem which metaphysical thinkers will have to ruminate upon for many years to come.  Even if such control should eventually grow clearly picturable, the question how far it is successfully exerted in this actual world can be answered only by investigating the details of fact.  No philosophic knowledge of the general nature and constitution of tendencies, or of the relation of larger to smaller ones, can help us to predict which of all the various competing tendencies that interest us in this universe are likeliest to prevail.  We know as an empirical fact that far-seeing tendencies often carry out their purpose, but we know also that they are often defeated by the failure of some contemptibly small process on which success depends.  A little thrombus in a statesman’s meningeal artery will throw an empire out of gear.  Therefore I cannot even hint at any solution of the pragmatic issue.  I have only wished to show you that that issue is what gives the real interest to all inquiries into what kinds of activity may be real.  Are the forces that really act in the world more foreseeing or more blind?  As between ‘our’ activities as ‘we’ experience them, and those of our ideas, or of our brain-cells, the issue is well defined.