Note 33 — Chapter I · REALITY AND EXPERIENCE

See the whole treatment of question of feeling in Dr. Stout’s Manual of Psychology. I do not, of course, mean that “consciousness of activity” successful or thwarted as a fact precedes and conditions pleasure-pain. On the contrary, it is a familiar fact of experience that we often learn what our purposes are for the first time by the pain which attends their defeat. E.g., a man may first realise that he is, and has been, in love by his pain at his mistress’s preference of a rival suitor. And nothing seems more certain than that many pleasures are quite independent of “actual conation,” as Plato long ago recognised.

I must take this opportunity to guard once for all against some plausible misconceptions. (a) When I speak of feeling as “purposive” or “teleological,” I do not mean to make what, to my own mind, would be the monstrous assumption, that it necessarily presupposes conscious anticipation of its guiding end or purpose. All that I mean is that the processes of conscious life are as a matter of fact only intelligible with reference to the results in which they culminate and which they serve to maintain; or again, that they all involve the kind of continuity of interest which belong to attention. (b) If attentive interest is not necessarily actual conation, actual conscious effort, still less is it necessarily actual will. For me, as for Mr. Bradley (see his article in Mind for October 1902), where there is no ideal anticipation of the result of a process there is neither actual desire nor actual will. And since I cannot see that all attention implies ideal anticpation, I certainly could not agree with Prof. Royce that ultimate Reality is simply the “internal meaning of an idea.”

My own meaning will be made clearer by reference to the illustration given at the beginning of this note. A man first realises that he has been in love because he feels pained at a rival’s success. So far as this is so, I should say, there has been no actual conation, and a fortiori, no actual will or desire. But—and this is my point—he would not feel the pain unless the success of the rival thwarted the successful issue of a specific psychophysical tendency of an essentially forward-reaching or teleological kind. The failure may for the first time make him aware of the presence of the tendency, but it must previously have been there as a condition of its own failure.failure.