we should not adopt, at any rate hypothetically, the view that all observed sequences have their ground in the activity of experiencing subjects. In this way, causality, as applied to perceptual experience, comes to have a definite concrete meaning, namely, the efficiency of active individuals. No doubt the concept is anthropomorphic, but that simply means that it is based on the nature of the subject, as distinguished from the object, of experience. Hence we realize that efficient causality certainly exists, and we are therefore justified in attempting to find a satisfactory interpretation of the sequences which occur objectively in experience, by the application to them of this concept of efficiency.
Activity is fundamental. Everyone realizes what it is to be active. Yet certain modern representatives of the traditional idealist school,[1] dismiss activity as pure illusion. It is difficult to see what the assertion 'All activity is illusion' can possibly mean, if it mean anything at all. When I think or do, I say that I am active. All that is meant by activity is a living and doing. If the idealist asserts that living and doing are illusions, the reply is simply that the illusion at any rate exists, and therefore it is the illusion itself that we mean by activity, if it be an illusion. There is no meaning at all in the term 'illusion' as applied to direct experience. It is only when wrong judgments are based on experience that illusion can be said to exist. When we talk of being active, it is simply a way of specifying a certain fact. We may draw wrong conclusions from the fact, and in that case
- ↑ E.g., F. H. Bradley in Appearance and Reality. The New Realists also reject activity (cf. R. B. Perry in Present Philosophical Tendencies, pp. 70. 99 and elsewhere). It is stated that all that is perceived is certain muscular sensations, etc., but no 'power.' This is not denied, but the fact (too often overlooked), which lies at the root of the question, is that activity is not an object of perception or knowledge at all. It is not presented to the subject, for it is the subject who is active. But we realize that we are active, although our activity is not presented to us. The realists and others might just as well deny the existence of perception, because we only find certain things given, of which our own 'perceptivity' is not one. We do not perceive our perceptivity—it is not an object of knowledge—but we realize that we perceive things, and the proposition asserting this fact is of course a piece of knowledge (by description, not perception). Hence there is no more ground for denying the existence of activity in general, than for denying the existence of perception, in which the subject is active in a particular way.
