amidst the content which it defines. But in the present view it is further maintained that the action of mind is nevertheless introspectively accessible in a peculiar way.

I refer to the time-honored theory that the action of mind is revealed to the agent himself in an immediate intuition. "Such is the nature of Spirit, or that which acts," says Berkeley, "that it cannot be of itself perceived . . . though it must be owned at the same time that we have some notion of soul, spirit, and the operations of the mind." The inner activity of consciousness is that "life-form of immediate reality" which "is lost if the psychological abstractions make it a describable object." 1

Berkeley's view met its classic refutation in Hume. He showed that the most exhaustive introspective analysis reveals no such 'creative power,' but only a manifold and nexus of contents. Taken "psychologically," says Mr. Bradley, "the revelation is fraudulent. There is no original experience of anything like activity." The supposition that there is such a revelation is possible only provided one refuses to analyze a certain experience into its elements. When the so-called experience of mental activity is so analyzed, no activity-element is found. The refusal to analyze what can be and has been analyzed cannot be justified by any canon of rigorous theoretical procedure." In other words, the intuitionist theory of mental activity is an instance of the fallacy of 'pseudo-simplicity.' "The simplicity, however, of the representation of a subject is not therefore a knowledge of the simplicity of the subject," says Kant. The intuitionist argument rests upon a confusion between the lack of complexity in the knowledge of the subject matter, and a lack of complexity in the subject matter itself."

1 Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge, Fraser's edition, Vol. I, p. 272; Münsterberg: The Eternal Values, p. 393.

• Hume: Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Section VII, Part I, passim; Bradley: Appearance and Reality, p. 116.

Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Max Müller, Second Edition,

pp. 289-290. Cf. above, pp. 261-264.

Philosophy is peculiarly liable to this fallacy in the case of self-knowledge, because of the extraordinary familiarity of 'self.' No one is so well acquainted with me as I am with myself. Primarily this means that whereas I have known myself repeatedly, and perhaps for considerable intervals continuously, others have known me only intermittently or not at all. To myself I am so much an old story that I may easily weary of myself. I do weary of myself, however, not because I understand myself so well, but because I live with myself so much. I may be familiar to the point of ennui with things I understand scarcely at all. Thus I may be excessively familiar with a volume in the family library without having ever looked between the covers. Indeed, degrees of knowledge are as likely to be inversely, as directly, proportional to degrees of familiarity. Familiarity is arbitrary like all habit, and there is nothing to prevent it from fixing and confirming a false or shallow opinion. The man whom we meet daily on the street is a familiar object. But we do not tend to know him better. On the contrary, our opinion tends to be as unalterable as it is accidental and one-sided. Everyone is familiar with a typical facial expression of the President, but who will claim that such familiarity conduces to knowledge of him? Similarly my familiarity with myself may actually stand in the way of my better knowledge. Because of it I may be too easily satisfied that I know myself, and will almost inevitably believe that my mind as I commonly know it is my mind in its essence. It cannot be said, then, that the individual mind's extraordinary familiarity with itself necessarily means that its knowledge of itself is exclusive or even superior. On the contrary, it means that in respect of knowledge of itself every mind is peculiarly liable to over-simplification to the assumption that knowledge is complete when, as a matter of fact, it has not yet begun.

These considerations also discredit, I think, the virtue so frequently attributed to self-consciousness. I am in

clined to believe that the prominence of this experience in traditional accounts of mind is due to the fact that it is characteristically habitual with philosophers. What but bias could have led to the opinion that self-consciousness is typical of mind? Surely nothing could be farther from the truth. If self-consciousness means anything, it means mind functioning in an elaborately complicated way. Now one may test a definition by applying it to complex and derivative forms, but one learns to isolate and identify a genus from a study of its simple forms. It would be consistent with sound procedure, then, to expect to understand mind-knowing-itself, only after one has an elementary knowledge of the general nature of mind and the special function of knowing. Surely in this respect, at least, philosophy has traditionally lacked the sound instinct that has guided science.

But waiving methodological considerations, what is to be said of the cognitive value of my self-consciousness? Suppose me to be as habitually self-conscious as the most confirmed philosopher. Have I on that account an expert knowledge of self? There could not, it seems to me, be a clearer case of the mistaking of habit for insight. Upon examination my self-consciousness resolves itself mainly into familiar images, and familiar phrases containing my name or the first personal pronoun, such as 'I am,' 'I will,' 'I think,' 'I act.' But these phrases are perfectly typical of the fixed and stereotyped character that may be acquired by a confused experience, or, indeed, by an experience that is nothing more than the verbal formulation of a problem. And the more fixed and stereotyped such experiences, the more their confusion or emptiness is neglected. This is the true explanation, I think, of what is the normal state of mind in the matter of selfknowledge. Your average man knows himself, "of course," and grasps eagerly at words and phrases imputing to him an esoteric knowledge of soul; but he can render no intelligible account of it. That he has never attempted;

he is secure only when among those as easily satisfied as himself.

Who is so familiar with farming as the farmer? But he despises the innovations of the theorist, because routine has warped, limited, and at the same time intensified his opinions; with the consequence that while no one is more intimately familiar with farming than he, no one, perhaps, is more hopelessly blinded to its real principles. Now it is my lot to be a self-conscious mind. I have practised self-consciousness habitually, and it is certain that no one is so familiar with myself as I. But I have little to show for it all: the articulatory image of my name, the visual image of my social presence, and a few poor phrases. There is a complex state to which I can turn when I will, but it is a page more thumbed than read. And I am lucky if I have not long ago become glibly innocent of my ignorance and joined the ranks of those who deliver confusion with the unction of profundity, and the name of the problem with the pride of mastery. No-so far I cannot see that the royal road to a knowledge of self-activity has led beyond the slough of complacency. Either appeal is made to what everyone "of course" knows, to the mere dogma of familiarity, or stereotyped verbalisms and other confused experiences are solemnly cherished as though the warmth of the philosophical bosom could somehow invest them with life.

Mental Action

as the Feeling of Bodily Action

§ 6. I am confident that the nature of mental action is discoverable neither by an analysis of mental contents nor by self-intuition; that it is necessary, in short, to abandon the method of self-knowledge altogether, and substitute that of general observation. But in the interests of thoroughness it is desirable to examine what at first glance appears to afford a reasonable compromise. I refer to the view that construes mental action as a peculiar introspective complex. This view is commonly held by those who reject the last. The intuition of a "Simon-pure activity," or an "activity

an sich" is rejected on grounds of introspective analysis. But analysis at the same time reveals a characteristic activity process, composed of sensations of bodily exertion and strain, or of feelings of "the tendency, the obstacle, 'the will, the strain, the triumph, or the passive giving up." James has suggested that this process can be reduced to still smaller proportions. "Whenever my introspective glance succeeds in turning round quickly enough to catch one of these manifestations of spontaneity in the act, all it can ever feel distinctly is some bodily process, for the most part taking place within the head." "It would follow that our entire feeling of spiritual activity, or what commonly passes by that name, is really a feeling of bodily activities whose exact nature is by most men overlooked."1

There are several objections to this version of mental action. In the first place, it is evident that the feeling of action belongs to the content of the mind, and therefore cannot be that general action by virtue of which things become content. It is not the correlate of content in general, but only of certain other content such as percepts and ideas. There is need of a kind of mental action that shall account for the presence in mind of this very activitycomplex itself.

Furthermore, there is an evident confusion in regarding the feeling of action as itself action. It is necessary, as the spiritists and transcendentalists have rightly maintained, to suppose some kind of action that shall bring contents together, and give them the peculiar within-mind unity which they possess. A consciousness of a and b is not a consciousness of a and a consciousness of b. the feeling of action is no more capable of effecting this conjunction than is any other content. A consciousness of "intra-cephalic movements" and the movements of an external body, a unity of consciousness in which these are present together, cannot derive its unity from a con

And

1 James: Pluralistic Universe, pp. 376, 380; Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, pp. 300, 301-302; cf. below, pp. 354-356.