here, partly because I have not yet been able to give sufficient attention to it, and partly because I do not take it to be offered as metaphysical doctrine. I shall confine myself therefore to some remarks in defence of my own position.
These pages, I must admit, were too short, and yet, if lengthened, I feared they would be too long; and it might have been better to have omitted them. But, after they have been censured, I cannot withdraw them; and I have left them, apart from a few verbal alterations, as they stood. The symbols that were perhaps misleading have, I hope, been amended. But I would ask the reader to depend less on them than on what follows in this Note.
With regard to the alleged confusion in my mind “between the fact of activity and the mere experience of being active on the one hand, and the idea or perception of activity on the other” (p. 174), I think that this confusion neither existed nor exists. I should have said on the other hand that, from first to last throughout this controversy, it was I that kept this distinction clearly in mind and strove in vain to get it recognized. This, right or wrong, is at least the view which the facts force me to take. The question, What is the content of activity as it appears to the soul at first, in distinction from it as it is for an outside observer, or for the soul later on? is exactly the question to which I failed throughout to get an intelligible reply. And if I myself in any place was blind to these distinctions—distinctions familiar even to the cursory reader of Hegel—that place has not yet been shown to me. But instead of going back on the past I will try at least to be explicit here.
(i) A man may take the view that there is an original experience of activity the content of which is complex and holds that which, when analyzed by reflection, becomes our developed idea of activity. Without of course venturing to say that this view is certainly false, I submit that we have no reason to believe it to be true.
(ii) A man may hold that we have an original experience which is not in itself complex nor has any internal diversity in its content. This experience, he may further hold, goes with (a) some or (b) all of those conditions, physical or psychical, which an outside observer would or might call an active state, and which the soul itself later would or might call so. And he may go on to maintain that this sensation or feeling (or call it what you will) is the differential condition, without the real or supposed presence of which no state, or no psychical state, would be called active at all.
Now this second doctrine is to my mind radically different from the first. Its truth or falsehood to my mind is an affair not of principle but of detail. Nay, to some extent and up to a certain point, I think it very probably is true. Why should there
