_that sort_ of thing will be what the
judgments are about. The first step to take, then, is to ask where in
the stream of experience we seem to find what we speak of as activity.
What we are to think of the activity thus found will be a later
question.

Now it is obvious that we are tempted to affirm activity wherever
we find anything _going on_. Taken in the broadest sense, any
apprehension of something _doing_, is an experience of activity. Were
our world describable only by the words 'nothing happening,' 'nothing
changing,' 'nothing doing,' we should unquestionably call it an
'inactive' world. Bare activity, then, as we may call it, means the
bare fact of event or change. 'Change taking place' is a unique
content of experience, one of those 'conjunctive' objects which
radical empiricism seeks so earnestly to rehabilitate and preserve.
The sense of activity is thus in the broadest and vaguest way
synonymous with the sense of 'life.' We should feel our own subjective
life at least, even in noticing and proclaiming an otherwise inactive
world. Our own reaction on its monotony would be the one thing
experienced there in the form of something coming to pass.

This seems to be what certain writers have in mind when they insist
that for an experient to be at all is to be active. It seems to
justify, or at any rate to explain, Mr. Ward's expression that we
_are_ only as we are active,[1]

[Footnote 1: _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. ii, p. 245. One thinks
naturally of the peripatetic _actus primus_ and _actus secundus_
here.]

for we _are_ only as experients; and it rules out Mr. Bradley's
contention that 'there is no original experience of anything like
activity.' What we ought to say about activities thus simply given,
whose they are, what they effect, or whether indeed they effect
anything at all--these are later questions, to be answered only when
the field of experience is enlarged.

Bare activity would thus be predicable, though there were no definite
direction, no actor, and no aim. Mere restless zigzag movement, or a
wild _ideenflucht_, or _rhapsodie der wahrnehmungen_, as Kant would
say, would constitute an active as distinguished from an inactive
world.

But in this actual world of ours, as it is given, a part at least of
the activity comes with definite direction; it comes with desire
and sense of goal; it comes complicated with resistances which it
overcomes or succumbs to, and with the efforts which