Note 102 — VI

I have found myself more than once accused in print of being the assertor of a metaphysical principle of activity. Since literary misunderstandings retard the settlement of problems, I should like to say that such an interpretation of the pages I have published on Effort and on Will is absolutely foreign to what I meant to express. [Principles of Psychology, vol. ii, ch. xxvi.] I owe all my doctrines on this subject to Renouvier; and Renouvier, as I understand him, is (or at any rate then was) an out and out phenomenist, a denier of ‘forces’ in the most strenuous sense. [Cf. Ch. Renouvier: Esquisse d’une Classification Systématique des Doctrines Philosophiques (1885), vol. ii, pp. 390-392; Essais de Critique Générale (1859), vol. ii, §§ ix, xiii. For an acknowledgment of the author’s general indebtedness to Renouvier, cf. Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 165, note. Ed.] Single clauses in my writing, or sentences read out of their connection, may possibly have been compatible with a transphenomenal principle of energy; but I defy anyone to show a single sentence which, taken with its context, should be naturally held to advocate that view. The misinterpretation probably arose at first from my defending (after Renouvier) the indeterminism of our efforts. ‘Free will’ was supposed by my critics to involve a supernatural agent. As a matter of plain history the only ‘free will’ I have ever thought of defending is the character of novelty in fresh activity-situations. If an activity-process is the form of a whole ‘field of consciousness,’ and if each field of consciousness is not only in its totality unique (as is now commonly admitted) but has its elements unique (since in that situation they are all dyed in the total) then novelty is perpetually entering the world and what happens there is not pure repetition, as the dogma of the literal uniformity of nature requires. Activity-situations come, in short, each with an original touch. A ‘principle’ of free will if there were one, would doubtless manifest itself in such phenomena, but I never saw, nor do I now see, what the principle could do except rehearse the phenomenon beforehand, or why it ever should be invoked.