of a world whose real causality is an unimaginable
ontological principle hidden in the
cubic deeps, is, for the more empirical way of
thinking, only animism in another shape.  You
explain your given fact by your 'principle,' but
the principle itself, when you look clearly at it,
turns out to be nothing but a previous little
spiritual copy of the fact.  Away from that one
and only kind of fact your mind, considering
causality, can never get.(2)
---

   1 Let me not be told that this contradicts [the first essay], 'Does
Consciousness Exist?' (see especially page 32), in which it was said
that while 'thoughts' and 'things' have the same natures, the natures
work 'energetically' on each other in the things (fire burns, water
wets, etc.) but not in the thoughts.  Mental activity-trains are
composed of thoughts, yet their members do work on each other, they
check, sustain, and introduce.  They do so when the activity is merely
associational as well as when effort is there.  But, and this is my
reply, they do so by other parts of their nature than those that
energize physically.  One thought in every developed activity-series is
a desire or thought of purpose, and all the other thoughts acquire a
feeling tone from their relation of harmony or oppugnancy to this.  The
interplay of these secondary tones (among which 'interest,'
'difficulty,' and 'effort' figure) runs the drama in the mental series.
In what we term the physical drama these qualities play absolutely no
part.  The subject needs careful working out; but I can see no
inconsistency.

   2 I have found myself more than once accused in print of being the
assertor of a metaphysical principle of activity.  Since literary
misunderstandings retard the settlement of problems, I should like to
say that such an interpretation of the pages I have published on Effort
and on Will is absolutely foreign to what I mean to express.
[_Principles_of_Psychology_, vol II, ch. XXVI.]  I ow all my doctrines
on this subject to Renouvier; and Renouvier, as I understand him, is (or
at any rate then was) an out and out phenomenalist, a denier of 'forces'
in the most strenuous sense.  [Cf. Ch. Renouvier:
_Esquisse_d'une_Classification_Systematique_des_Doctrines_Philosophiques_
(1885), vol. II, pp. 390-392; _Essais_de_Critique_Generale_ (1859), vol.
II, sections ix, xiii.  For an acknowledgement of the author's general
indebtedness to Renouvier, cf. _Some_Problems_of_Philosophy_, p. 165,
note.  ED.]  Single clauses in my writing, or sentences read out of
their connection, may possibly have been compatible with a
transphenomenal principle of energy; but I defy anyone to show a single
sentence which, taken with its context, should be naturally held to
advocate that view.  The misinterpretation probably arose at first from
my defending (after Renouvier) the indeterminism of our efforts.  'Free
will' was supposed by my critics to involve a supernatural agent.  As a
matter of plain history the only 'free will' I have ever thought of
defending is the character of novelty in fresh activity-situations.  If
an activity-process is the form of a whole 'field of consciousness,' and
if each field of consciousness is not only in its totality unique (as is
now commonly admitted) but has its elements unique (since in that
situation they are all dyed in the total) then novelty is perpetually
entering the world and what happens there is not pure _repetition_, as
the dogma of the literal uniformity of nature requires.
Activity-situations come, in short, each with an original touch.  A
'principle' of free will if there were one, would doubtless manifest
itself in such phenomena, but I never say, nor do I now see, what the
principle could do except rehearse the phenomenon beforehand, or why it
ever should be invoked.

186
for philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground
for what effects effectuation, or what
makes action act, and to try to solve the concrete
questions of where effectuation in this
world is located, of which things are the true
causal agents there, and of what the more
remote effects consist.

     From this point of view the greater sublimity
traditionally attributed to the metaphysical
inquiry, the grubbing inquiry, entirely disappears.
If we could know what causation
really and transcendentally is in itself, the only
_use_ of the knowledge would be to help us to
recognize an actual cause when we had one,
and so to track the future course of operations
more intelligently out.  The mere abstract
inquiry into causation's hidden nature
is not more sublime than any other inquiry
equally abstract.  Causation inhabits no more
sublime level than anything else.  It lives,
apparently, in the dirt of the world as well
as in the absolute, or in man's unconquerable
mind.  The worth and interest of the world
consists not in its elements, be these elements

187
things, or be they the conjunctions of things;
it exists rather in the dramatic outcome in
the whole process, and in the meaning of the
succession stages which the elements work out.

     My colleague and master, Josiah Royce, in
a page of his review of Stout's _Analytic_Psychology(1)
has some fine words on this point