the metaphysical inquiry, the grubbing inquiry, entirely
disappears. If we could know what causation really and
transcendentally is in itself, the only _use_ of the knowledge would
be to help us to recognize an actual cause when we had one, and so to
track the future course of operations more intelligently out. The mere
abstract inquiry into causation's hidden nature is not more sublime
than any other inquiry equally abstract. Causation inhabits no more
sublime level than anything else. It lives, apparently, in the dirt of
the world as well as in the absolute, or in man's unconquerable mind.
The worth and interest of the world consists not in its elements,
be these elements things, or be they the conjunctions of things; it
exists rather in the dramatic outcome of the whole process, and in the
meaning of the succession stages which the elements work out.

My colleague and master, Josiah Royce, in a page of his review of
Stout's _Analytic Psychology_, in _Mind_ for 1897, has some fine words
on this point with which I cordially agree. I cannot agree with his
separating the notion of efficacy from that of activity altogether
(this I understand to be one contention of his), for activities are
efficacious whenever they are real activities at all. But the inner
nature both of efficacy and of activity are superficial problems, I
understand Royce to say; and the only point for us in solving them
would be their possible use in helping us to solve the far deeper
problem of the course and meaning of the world of life. Life, says
our colleague, is full of significance, of meaning, of success and of
defeat, of hoping and of striving, of longing, of desire, and of inner
value. It is a total presence that embodies worth. To live our own
lives better in this presence is the true reason why we wish to know
the elements of things; so even we psychologists must end on this
pragmatic note.

The urgent problems of activity are thus more concrete. They all
are problems of the true relation of longer-span to shorter-span
activities. When, for example, a number of 'ideas' (to use the name
traditional in psychology) grow confluent in a larger field of
consciousness, do the smaller activities still coexist with the wider
activities then experienced by the conscious subject? And, if so, do
the wide activities accompany the narrow ones inertly, or do they
exert control? Or do they perhaps utterly supplant and replace them
and short-circuit their