Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/584

MB. F. H. BEADLE Y'S ANALYSIS OF MIND. 571 from its objects, the presentations attended to. Other terms may be used thought, sentience, consciousness : this unanalysable activity may be confounded with its object, as was done by the faculty-psychologists with their powers of perception, conception, and what not ; but the activity is there all the same. But if it is unanalysable, why call it activity rather than any- thing else? asks Mr. Bradley. This question implies that activity has a meaning apart from psychical activity, and such is, as we have seen, Mr. Bradley's opinion. The contrary, I should have thought, was nearer the truth : all terms implying action as distinct from mere happening are commonly regarded as anthropomorphic. That is to say, this unanalysable psychical ele- ment is taken as the type and source of all other conceptions of activity : they involve it, it does not involve them. It is quite true, however, that the current conception of activity is derived from the " active process rather than from the intellectual, and it is in every way reasonable to ask whether there really is activity in both, and a common activity. But I have already dealt with this question (No. 45, pp. 58-61). Mr. Bradley has still an objection : Suppose your analysis admitted, and that all psychical activity is fundamentally one attention to presentations ; still you have only substituted one faculty for several; "the vice of admitting faculties is there all the same ". In the first place this is a serious over- statement : it would be a very real gain to psychology if its facts could be so far simplified, a gain comparable to the simplification in physics obtained by the modern conception of energy. Mr. Bradley might as well cavil with this because it still uses the term force. But further, the vice denounced is not chargeable against the analysis I am defending. It is not proposed to explain psychical facts by assuming a faculty beyond them. All that is meant is that in every psychical fact there is a subject attending; not that beyond these acts of attending there is a potential attention. The subject is not regarded as merely capable of attention and as attending, when it chances to attend, by means of an appropriate faculty ; but it only is an actual subject as it actually attends. Mr. Sully and Prof. Wundt can speak for themselves if they think it worth while ; but for myself I entirely repudiate Mr. Bradley's account of my views. Nothing so fatuous as confounding an analysis with an explanation is fairly chargeable against me. I might as well accuse Mr. Bradley of mythology because he talks of the laws of Contiguity and Blending as working thus and thus. In my remarks (No. 45, pp. 66 ff.) on Mr. Bradley's earlier article (in No. 43), I tried to show that the account he gave of the origin of the conception of activity confirmed, in spite of him, the analysis he was seeking to overthrow. Mr. Bradley has modified this account in one important particular, but excuses himself from entering further into my criticisms, because he