briefly point out where the idea lies, without of course attempting to analyze fully the dog’s complex state. The ground in front of the dog is a perception qualified on the one hand, not by images, but by an enlargement of its content so as to become “ground run over.” It comes to the dog therefore at once as both “run over” and “not.” And the “run over” is ideal, though it is not an explicit idea or a forethought or in any sense a separate image. Again the dog comes to himself as qualified by an actual running, supplemented by an ideal running over what is seen in front of him. In his soul is a triumphant process of ideal expansion passing over unbrokenly into actual fruition, the negative perception of the ground as “not run over” serving only as the vanishing condition of a sense of activity with no cloud or check of failure. This is what I meant by an idea which is not explicit, nor, except that the name is perhaps a bad one, do I see anything in it deserving censure. I should perhaps have done better to have used no name at all. But the distinction itself, I must repeat, is throughout every aspect of mind of vital importance.
But that I failed to be clear is evident, both from Mr. Stout’s criticism and also from some interesting remarks by Professor Baldwin in the Psychological Review, Vol. i, No. 6. The relation of felt activity to desire, and the possibility of their independence and of the priority of one to the other, is to my mind a very difficult question, but I should add that to my mind it is not a very important one. I hope that both Mr. Stout and Professor Baldwin will see from the above that my failure was to some extent one merely of expression, and that our respective divergence is not as great as at first sight it might appear to be. As to the absence of felt self-activity in certain states of mind I may add that I am wholly and entirely at one with Professor Baldwin.
The above remarks are offered mainly as a defence against the charge of inconsistency, and not as a proof that the view I take of activity and of passivity is in general true. I must hope, in spite of many disappointments, to address myself at some time elsewhere to a further discussion of the perception no less of passivity than of activity. [See now Mind, Nos. 40, 41 and 46.]
p. 143. I have in this edition re-written pp. 141-3, since their statement was in some points wanting in clearness. The objection, indicated in the text, which would refute the plurality of reals by an argument drawn from the fact of knowledge, may be stated here briefly and in outline.
The Many not only are independent but ex hyp. are also known to be so; and these two characters of the Many seem incompatible. Knowledge must somehow be a state of one or more of the Many, a state in which they are known to be plural; for except in the Many where can we suppose that any
