ns, to be answered only
when the field of experience is enlarged.

Bare activity would thus be predicable, though there were no definite
direction, no actor, and no aim. Mere restless zigzag movement, or a
wild _Ideenflucht_, or _Rhapsodie der Wahrnehmungen_, as Kant would
say,[92] would constitute an active as distinguished from an inactive
world.

But in this actual world of ours, as it is given, a part at least of
the activity comes with definite direction; it comes with desire and
sense of goal; it comes complicated with resistances which it
overcomes or succumbs to, and with the efforts which 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.[93] In their descriptions, exquisitely
subtle some of them,[94] the activity appears as the _gestaltqualitaet_
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?[95] 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';[96] 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, 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