ucing the result?

This would be the pragmatic meaning of the three hypotheses. Let us
take them in succession in seeking a reply.

If we assume a wider thinker, it is evident that his purposes envelop
mine. I am really lecturing _for_ him; and altho I cannot surely know
to what end, yet if I take him religiously, I can trust it to be a
good end, and willingly connive. I can be happy in thinking that my
activity transmits his impulse, and that his ends prolong my own. So
long as I take him religiously, in short, he does not de-realize my
activities. He tends rather to corroborate the reality of them, so
long as I believe both them and him to be good.

When now we turn to ideas, the case is different, inasmuch as ideas
are supposed by the association psychology to influence each other
only from next to next. The 'span' of an idea, or pair of ideas, is
assumed to be much smaller instead of being larger than that of my
total conscious field. The same results may get worked out in both
cases, for this address is being given anyhow. But the ideas supposed
to 'really' work it out had no prevision of the whole of it; and if
I was lecturing for an absolute thinker in the former case, so,
by similar reasoning, are my ideas now lecturing for me, that is,
accomplishing unwittingly a result which I approve and adopt. But,
when this passing lecture is over, there is nothing in the bare notion
that ideas have been its agents that would seem to guarantee that my
present purposes in lecturing will be prolonged. _I_ may have ulterior
developments in view; but there is no certainty that my ideas as such
will wish to, or be able to, work them out.

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 let