eing 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 meant to
express. I owe 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 phenomenist, a denier of 'forces' in the most strenuous
sense. Single clauses in my writing, or sentences read out of their
connexion, may possibly have been compatible with a transphenomenal
principle of energy; but I defy any one 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
having defended (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
saw, nor do I now see, what the principle could do except rehearse the
phenomenon beforehand, or why it ever should be invoked.]

I conclude, then, that real effectual causation as an ultimate nature,
as a 'category,' if you like, of reality, is _just what we feel it
to be_, just that kind of conjunction which our own activity-series
reveal. We have the whole butt and being of it in our hands; and the
healthy thing 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