My colleague and master, Josiah Royce, in a page of his review of
Stout's _Analytic Psychology_[103] 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 are all
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 co-exist 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
effects? Again, when a mental activity-process and a brain-cell series
of activities both terminate in the same muscular movement, does the
mental process steer the neural processes or not? Or, on the other hand,
does it independently short-circuit their effects? Such are the
questions that we must begin with. But so far am I from suggesting any
definitive answer to such questions, that I hardly yet can put them
clearly. They lead, however, into that region of panpsychic and
ontologic speculation of which Professors Bergson and Strong have lately
enlarged the literature in so able and interesting a way.[104] The
results of these authors seem in many respects dissimilar, and I
understand than as yet but imperfectly; but I cannot help suspecting
that the direction of their work is very promising, and that they have
the hunter's instinct for the fruitful trails.

FOOTNOT