the feeling of
resistance so often provokes; and it is in complex experiences like
these that the notions of distinct agents, and of passivity as opposed
to activity arise. Here also the notion of causal efficacy comes
to birth. Perhaps the most elaborate work ever done in descriptive
psychology has been the analysis by various recent writers of the more
complex activity-situations. In their descriptions, exquisitely subtle
some of them,[1] the activity appears as the _gestalt-qualitaet_

[Footnote 1: Their existence forms a curious commentary on Professor
Munsterberg's dogma that will-attitudes are not describable. He
himself has contributed in a superior way to their description, both
in his _Willenshandlung_, and in his _Grundzuege_, Part II, chap, ix, Sec.
7.]

or the _fundirte inhalt_ (or as whatever else you may please to call
the conjunctive form) which the content falls into when we experience
it in the ways which the describers set forth. Those factors in those
relations are what we _mean_ by activity-situations; and to the
possible enumeration and accumulation of their circumstances and
ingredients there would seem to be no natural bound. Every hour of
human life could contribute to the picture gallery; and this is the
only fault that one can find with such descriptive industry--where is
it going to stop? Ought we to listen forever to verbal pictures of
what we have already in concrete form in our own breasts?[1]
They never take us off the superficial plane. We knew the facts
already--less spread out and separated, to be sure--but we knew them
still. We always felt our own activity, for example, as 'the expansion
of an idea with which our Self is identified, against an obstacle';
and the following out of such a definition through a multitude of
cases elaborates the obvious so as to be little more than an exercise
in synonymic speech.

All the descriptions have to trace familiar outlines, and to use
familiar terms. The activity is, for example,

[Footnote 1: I ought myself to cry _peccavi_, having been a voluminous
sinner in my own chapter on the will.]

attributed either to a physical or to a mental agent, and is either
aimless or directed. If directed, it shows tendency. The tendency may
or may not be resisted. If not, we call the activity immanent, as when
a body moves in empty space by its momentum, or our thoughts wander at
their own sweet will. If resistance is met, _its_ agent complicates
the sit