nts 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 no 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. I can
therefore not 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 a while back[100] that I should return to the 'metaphysical'
question before ending; so, with a few words about that, I will now
close my remarks.

In whatever form we hear this question propounded, I think that it
always arises from two things, a belief that _causality_ must be exerted
in activity, and a wonder as to how causality is made. If we take an
activity-situation at i