ting me lecture
now, on other occasions they make me do things that I would willingly
not do.

The question _Whose is the real activity?_ is thus tantamount to the
question _What will be the actual results?_ Its interest is dramatic;
how will things work out? If the agents are of one sort, one way; if
of another sort, they may work out very differently. The pragmatic
meaning of the various alternatives, in short, is great. It makes more
than a merely verbal difference which opinion we take up.

You see it is the old dispute come back! Materialism and teleology;
elementary short-span actions summing themselves 'blindly,' or far
foreseen ideals coming with effort into act.

Naively we believe, and humanly and dramatically we like to believe,
that activities both of wider and of narrower span are at work in life
together, that both are real, and that the long-span tendencies yoke
the others in their service, encouraging them in the right direction,
and damping them when they tend in other ways. But how to represent
clearly the _modus operandi_ of such steering of small tendencies
by large ones is a problem which metaphysical thinkers will have to
ruminate upon for many years to come. Even if such control should
eventually grow clearly picturable, the question how far it is
successfully exerted in this actual world can be answered only by
investigating the details of fact. No philosophic knowledge of the
general nature and constitution of tendencies, or of the relation
of larger to smaller ones, can help us to predict which of all the
various competing tendencies that interest us in this universe are
likeliest to prevail. We know as an empirical fact that far-seeing
tendencies often carry out their purpose, but we know also that they
are often defeated by the failure of some contemptibly small process
on which success depends. A little thrombus in a statesman's meningeal
artery will throw an empire out of gear. Therefore I cannot even hint
at any solution of the pragmatic issue. I have only wished to show you
that that issue is what gives the real interest to all inquiries into
what kinds of activity may be real. Are the forces that really act in
the world more foreseeing or more blind? As between 'our' activities
as 'we' experience them, and those of our ideas, or of our
brain-cells, the issue is well defined.

I said awhile back (p. 381) that I should return to the 'metaphysical'
question before ending; so, with a fe