' [The next
essay. Cf. especially, p. 169. ED.]

VI

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY[85]

BRETHREN OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION:

In casting about me for a subject for your President this year to talk
about it has seemed to me that our experiences of activity would form a
good one; not only because the topic is so naturally interesting, and
because it has lately led to a good deal of rather inconclusive
discussion, but because I myself am growing more and more interested in
a certain systematic way of handling questions, and want to get others
interested also, and this question strikes me as one in which, although
I am painfully aware of my inability to communicate new discoveries or
to reach definitive conclusions, I yet can show, in a rather definite
manner, how the method works.

The way of handling things I speak of, is, as you already will have
suspected, that known sometimes as the pragmatic method, sometimes as
humanism, sometimes as Deweyism, and in France, by some of the disciples
of Bergson, as the Philosophie nouvelle. Professor Woodbridge's _Journal
of Philosophy_[86] seems unintentionally to have become a sort of
meeting place for those who follow these tendencies in America. There is
only a dim identity among them; and the most that can be said at present
is that some sort of gestation seems to be in the atmosphere, and that
almost any day a man with a genius for finding the right word for things
may hit upon some unifying and conciliating formula that will make so
much vaguely similar aspiration crystallize into more definite form.

I myself have given the name of 'radical empiricism' to that version of
the tendency in question which I prefer; and I propose, if you will now
let me, to illustrate what I mean by radical empiricism, by applying it
to activity as an example, hoping at the same time incidentally to
leave the general problem of activity in a slightly--I fear very
slightly--more manageable shape than before.

Mr. Bradley calls the question of activity a scandal to philosophy, and
if one turns to the current literature of the subject--his own writings
included--one easily gathers what he means. The opponents cannot even
understand one another. Mr. Bradley says to Mr. Ward: "I do not care
what your oracle is, and your preposterous psychology may here be gospel
if you please; ... but if the revelation does contain a meaning, I will
commit myself to this: either the oracle is so confu