lf say was quite
foreign to the intention of his text.

In these discussions distinct questions are habitually jumbled and
different points of view are talked of _durcheinander_.

(1) There is a psychological question: Have we perceptions of
activity? and if so, what are they like, and when and where do we have
them?

(2) There is a metaphysical question: Is there a _fact_ of activity?
and if so, what idea must we frame of it? What is it like? and what
does it do, if it does anything? And finally there is a logical
question:

(3) Whence do we _know_ activity? By our own feelings of it solely? or
by some other source of information? Throughout page after page of the
literature one knows not which of these questions is before one; and
mere description of the surface-show of experience is proffered as if
it implicitly answered every one of them. No one of the disputants,
moreover, tries to show what pragmatic consequences his own view
would carry, or what assignable particular differences in any one's
experience it would make if his adversary's were triumphant.

[Footnote 1: _Mind_, N.S., VI, 379.]

It seems to me that if radical empiricism be good for anything, it
ought, with its pragmatic method and its principle of pure experience,
to be able to avoid such tangles, or at least to simplify them
somewhat. The pragmatic method starts from the postulate that there
is no difference of truth that doesn't make a difference of fact
somewhere; and it seeks to determine the meaning of all differences of
opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon as possible upon some
practical or particular issue. The principle of pure experience is
also a methodical postulate. Nothing shall be admitted as fact, it
says, except what can be experienced at some definite time by some
experient; and for every feature of fact ever so experienced, a
definite place must be found somewhere in the final system of reality.
In other words: Everything real must be experienceable somewhere, and
every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real.

Armed with these rules of method, let us see what face the problems of
activity present to us.

By the principle of pure experience, either the word 'activity' must
have no meaning at all, or else the original type and model of what
it means must lie in some concrete kind of experience that can be
definitely pointed out. Whatever ulterior judgments we may eventually
come to make regarding activity,