_gelten_. It
is witnessed at its work. No matter what activities there may really be
in this extraordinary universe of ours, it is impossible for us to
conceive of any one of them being either lived through or authentically
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 anyone 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.[98] It
is evident from this that mere descriptive analysis of any one of our
activity-experiences is not the whole story, that there is something
still to tell _about_ them that has led such able writers to conceive of
a _Simon-pure_ activity, of an activity _an sich_, that does, and
doesn't merely appear to us to do, and compared with whose real doing
all this phenomenal activity is but a specious sham.

The metaphysical question opens here; and I think that the state of mind
of one possessed by it is often something like this: "It is all very
well," we may imagine him saying, "to talk about certain
experience-series taking on the form of feelings of activity, just as
they might take on musical or geometric forms. Suppose that they do so;
suppose we feel a will to stand a strain. Does our feeling do more than
_record_ the fact that the strain is sustained? The _real_ activity,
meanwhile, is the _doing_ of the fact; and what is the doing made of
before the record is made. What in the will _enables_ it to act thus?
And these trains of experience themselves, in which activities appear,
what makes them _go_ at all? Does the activity in one bit of experience
bring the next bit into being? As an empiricist you cannot say so, for
you have just declared ac