[Footnote 1:  President’s Address before the American Psychological Association, December, 1904.  Reprinted from the Psychological Review, vol. xii, 1905, with slight verbal revision.]

[Footnote 2:  Appearance and Reality, p. 117.  Obviously written at Ward, though Ward’s name is not mentioned.]

in a review of Stout,[1] hauls him over the coals at great length for defending ‘efficacy’ in a way which I, for one, never gathered from reading him, and which I have heard Stout himself say was quite foreign to the intention of his text.

In these discussions distinct questions are habitually jumbled and different points of view are talked of durcheinander.

(1) There is a psychological question:  Have we perceptions of activity? and if so, what are they like, and when and where do we have them?

(2) There is a metaphysical question:  Is there a fact of activity? and if so, what idea must we frame of it?  What is it like? and what does it do, if it does anything?  And finally there is a logical question: 

(3) Whence do we know activity?  By our own feelings of it solely? or by some other source of information?  Throughout page after page of the literature one knows not which of these questions is before one; and mere description of the surface-show of experience is proffered as if it implicitly answered every one of them.  No one of the disputants, moreover, tries to show what pragmatic consequences his own view would carry, or what assignable particular differences in any one’s experience it would make if his adversary’s were triumphant.

[Footnote 1:  Mind, N.S., VI, 379.]

It seems to me that if radical empiricism be good for anything, it ought, with its pragmatic method and its principle of pure experience, to be able to avoid such tangles, or at least to simplify them somewhat.  The pragmatic method starts from the postulate that there is no difference of truth that doesn’t make a difference of fact somewhere; and it seeks to determine the meaning of all differences of opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon as possible upon some practical or particular issue.  The principle of pure experience is also a methodical postulate.  Nothing shall be admitted as fact, it says, except what can be experienced at some definite time by some experient; and for every feature of fact ever so experienced, a definite place must be found somewhere in the final system of reality.  In other words:  Everything real must be experienceable somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real.

Armed with these rules of method, let us see what face the problems of activity present to us.

By the principle of pure experience, either the word ‘activity’ must have no meaning at all, or else the original type and model of what it means must lie in some concrete kind of experience that can be definitely pointed out.  Whatever ulterior judgments we may eventually come to make regarding activity, that sort of thing will be what the judgments are about.  The first step to take, then, is to ask where in the stream of experience we seem to find what we speak of as activity.  What we are to think of the activity thus found will be a later question.