endeavoring to overcome obstacles outside of it; but it arises within activity, marking the attempt to coördinate separate factors within a single whole. Activity is here taken not as formal, but as actual and specific. It means an act, definitely doing something definite. An act, as something which occupies time, necessarily means conflict of acts. The demand for time is simply the result of a lack of unity. The intervening process of execution, the use of means, is the process of disintegrating acts hitherto separate and independent, and putting together the result, or fragments, into a single piece of conduct. Were it not for the division of acts and results in conflict, the deed, or coördination, would be accomplished at once.
One of the conflicting acts stands for the end or aim. This, at first, is the sensory image which gives the cue and motive to the reaction or response. In the case previously cited, it is the image of the colored speck, as determining the movements of the head and eye muscles.[1] That we are inclined to view only the motor response as act, and regard the image, either as alone psychical, or as pure idea, is because the image is already in existence, and, therefore, its active side may be safely neglected. Being already in possession of the field, it does not require any conscious activity to keep it in existence. The movement of the muscles, being the means by which the desired end may be reached, becomes the all-important thing, or the act; in accordance with the general principle that attention always goes to the weakest part of a coördination in process of formation, meaning by weakest, that part least under the immediate control of habit. This being conceived alone as act, everything lying outside of it is conceived as resistance; thus recognition is avoided of the fact, that the real state of things is, that there are two acts mutually opposing each other, during their transformation over into a third new and inclusive act.
- ↑ It must not be forgotten that both sensory stimulus and motor response are both in reality sensori-motor, and, therefore, each is itself an act or psychical whole. On this point, see my article in the Psychological Review for July, 1896, entitled "The Reflex Arc Concept."
