example. My brain-cells are believed to excite
each other from next to next (by contiguous transmission of katabolic
alteration, let us say) and to have been doing so long before this
present stretch of lecturing-activity on my part began. If any one
cell-group stops its activity, the lecturing will cease or show disorder
of form. _Cessante causa, cessat et effectus_--does not this look as if
the short-span brain activities were the more real activities, and the
lecturing activities on my part only their effects? Moreover, as Hume so
clearly pointed out,[99] in my mental activity-situation the words
physically to be uttered are represented as the activity's immediate
goal. These words, however, cannot be uttered without intermediate
physical processes in the bulb and vagi nerves, which processes
nevertheless fail to figure in the mental activity-series at all. That
series, therefore, since it leaves out vitally real steps of action,
cannot represent the real activities. It is something purely subjective;
the _facts_ of activity are elsewhere. They are something far more
interstitial, so to speak, than what my feelings record.

The _real_ facts of activity that have in point of fact been
systematically pleaded for by philosophers have, so far as my
information goes, been of three principal types.

The first type takes a consciousness of wider time-span than ours to be
the vehicle of the more real activity. Its will is the agent, and its
purpose is the action done.

The second type assumes that 'ideas' struggling with one another are the
agents, and that the prevalence of one set of them is the action.

The third type believes that nerve-cells are the agents, and that
resultant motor discharges are the acts achieved.

Now if we must de-realize our immediately felt activity-situations for
the benefit of either of these types of substitute, we ought to know
what the substitution practically involves. _What practical difference
ought it to make if_, instead of saying naively that 'I' am active now
in delivering this address, I say that _a wider thinker is active_, or
that _certain ideas are active_, or that _certain nerve-cells are
active_, in producing the result?

This would be the pragmatic meaning of the three hypotheses. Let us take
them in succession in seeking a reply.

If we assume a wider thinker, it is evident that his purposes envelope
mine. I am really lecturing _for_ him; and although I cannot surely know