thentically known otherwise than in this dramatic
shape of something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles
and overcoming or being overcome. What 'sustaining' means here is
clear to any one who has lived through the experience, but to no one
else; just as 'loud,' 'red,' 'sweet,' mean something only to beings
with ears, eyes, and tongues. The _percipi_ in these originals of
experience is the _esse_; the curtain is the picture. If there is
anything hiding in the background, it ought not to be called activity,
but should get itself another name.

This seems so obviously true that one might well experience
astonishment at finding so many of the ablest writers on the subject
flatly denying that the activity we live through in these situations
is real. Merely to feel active is not to be active, in their sight.
The agents that appear in the experience are not real agents, the
resistances do not really resist, the effects that appear are not
really effects at all.[1] It is evident from this that

[Footnote 1: _Verborum gratia_:'The feeling of activity is not able,
qua feeling, to tell us anything about activity' (Loveday: _Mind_,
N.S., X., 403); 'A sensation or feeling or sense of activity ... is
not, looked at in another way, a feeling of activity at all. It is a
mere sensation shut up within which you could by no reflection get the
idea of activity.... Whether this experience is or is not later on a
character essential to our perception and our idea of activity, it, as
it comes first, is not in itself an experience of activity at all. It,
as it comes first, is only so for extraneous reasons and only so for
an outside observer' (Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, 2d edition,
p. 605); 'In dem taetigkeitsgefuehle leigt an 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
a