Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/79

66 J. WARD : we cannot analyse may be a necessary link in the process of attending, but maintains that we have still no warrant for such a supposition ; because at the stage where activity " is recognised and is felt as such we can see at once its com- posite character ". Thereupon he proceeds to ascertain the conditions under which this recognition of activity arises. On all this there is only space for three brief remarks. First, it is misleading to apply the phrase " psychical event " to attention if attention is an unanalysable element in every psychical event. It is obviously impossible that what is a constituent in every psychical event can be explicable in terms of psychical events, and the demand for such an explanation amounts logically to a tacit denial of any hetero- geneity in mind at all. Matter may be infinitely divisible, but it does not therefore follow that a watch is made of watches. Secondly, Mr. Bradley is doubtless well aware of the difference between the simplicity of an idea and the idea of simplicity, between the complexity necessarily involved in the idea of the simplest relation, and the simplicity of the relation as an actual fact. Yet all that he does is to show that our conception of activity is complex, not that action itself is so ; nor does he succeed in resolving activity itself into a mere interaction of presentations inter se. This brings us, thirdly, to his account of the origin of what he calls the feeling of activity one might say, to his attempt to explain it away. In this he makes certain assumptions which seem to surrender the entire position contended for. The account is substantially a resume of what Herbartian psycho- logists, such as Nahlowsky and Waitz, offer as an analysis of the so-called "formal feelings," and except for the pre- liminary assumptions has little relevance to our question at all. Here they are : " I have to assume the doctrine that of our psychical contents a certain group is closely united, and is connected in a very special manner with flea sure and pain, and that this group is the first appearance of our self, have to assume again that this psychical mass, with its connexions, is perpetually growing larger and smaller as against other contents. And I must assume once more that the expansion gives in general a feeling of pleasure, while contraction brings pain, and that we may call these the two chief modes of self-feeling " (MiND xi. 319). Now it is easy to see that the " first appearance of our self" means not the first beginning of the conscious subject but that stage "in the growth of the soul " at which the con- scious subject acquires the idea of self, becomes, as we say, self-conscious. It is also clear that pleasure and pain are not actual constituents of this " first appearance of self," but, as we are told, are connected with it, inasmuch as certain changes in this group bring or give (to the conscious