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. Although these are letting me lecture now, on other
occasions they make me do things that I would willingly not do.

The question _Whose is the real activity?_ is thus tantamount to the
question _What will be the actual results?_ Its interest is dramatic;
how will things work out? If the age