ers 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.

The _real_ facts of activity that have in point of fact been
systematically pleaded for by philosophers have, so far as my
information goes, been of three principal types.

The first type takes a consciousness of wider time-span than ours to
be the vehicle of the more real activity. Its will is the agent, and
its purpose is the action done.

The second type assumes that 'ideas' struggling with one another are
the agents, and that the prevalence of one set of them is the action.

The third type believes that nerve-cells are the agents, and that
resultant motor discharges are the acts achieved.

Now if we must de-realize our immediately felt activity-situations for
the benefit of either of these types of substitute, we ought to know
what the substitution practically involves. _What practical difference
ought it to make if_, instead of saying naively that 'I' am active now
in delivering this address, I say that _a wider thinker is active_,
or that _certain ideas are active_, or that _certain nerve-cells are
active_, in prod