ts face-value, it seems as if we caught _in
flagrante delicto_ the very power that makes facts come and be. I now am
eagerly striving, for example, to get this truth which I seem half to
perceive, into words which shall make it show more clearly. If the words
come, it will seem as if the striving itself had drawn or pulled them
into actuality out from the state of merely possible being in which they
were. How is this feat performed? How does the pulling _pull_? How do I
get my hold on words not yet existent, and when they come by what means
have I _made_ them come? Really it is the problem of creation; for in
the end the question is: How do I make them _be_? Real activities are
those that really make things be, without which the things are not, and
with which they are there. Activity, so far as we merely feel it, on the
other hand, is only an impression of ours, it may be maintained; and an
impression is, for all this way of thinking, only a shadow of another
fact.

Arrived at this point, I can do little more than indicate the principles
on which, as it seems to me, a radically empirical philosophy is obliged
to rely in handling such a dispute.

If there _be_ real creative activities in being, radical empiricism
must say, somewhere they must be immediately lived. Somewhere the
_that_ of efficacious causing and the _what_ of it must be experienced
in one, just as the what and the that of 'cold' are experienced in one
whenever a man has the sensation of cold here and now. It boots not to
say that our sensations are fallible. They are indeed; but to see the
thermometer contradict us when we say 'it is cold' does not abolish
cold as a specific nature from the universe. Cold is in the arctic
circle if not here. Even so, to feel that our train is moving when the
train beside our window moves, to see the moon through a telescope
come twice as near, or to see two pictures as one solid when we look
through a stereoscope at them, leaves motion, nearness, and solidity
still in being--if not here, yet each in its proper seat elsewhere.
And wherever the seat of real causality _is_, as ultimately known 'for
true' (in nerve-processes, if you will, that cause our feelings of
activity as well as the movements which these seem to prompt), a
philosophy of pure experience can consider the real causation as no
other _nature_ of thing than that which even in our most erroneous
experiences appears to be at work. Exactly what appears there is