F. H. Bradley

“ The assertor of the latter alternative should then present us with the right ideas—a thing which, I need not add, he is not forward to perform. But let us leave these poor excuses to take care of themselves, and let us turn to the facts. There, if we examine the way in which the term activity is employed, the result is not doubtful. Force, energy, power, activity, these phrases certainly are used too often without clear understanding. But no rational man employs them except to convey some kind of meaning, which is capable of being discovered and subjected to analysis. ”

“ But if the thing cannot act unless the act is occasioned, then the transition, so far, is imported into it by the act of something outside. But this, as we saw, was passivity. Whatever acts then must be passive, so far as its change is occasioned. If we look at the process as the coming out of its nature, the process is its activity. If we regard the same process, on the other hand, as due to the occasion, and, as we say, coming from that, we still have activity. But the activity now belongs to the occasion, and the thing is passive. ”

“ The element in its meaning, which comes to light at once, is succession and change. In all activity something clearly becomes something else. Activity implies a happening and a sequence in time. And, when I spoke of this meaning as coming to the light, I might have added that it positively stares us in the face, and it is not to be hidden. ”

“ Thus the transition of activity implies always a cause.
Activity is caused change, but it also must be more. For one thing, altered by another, is not usually thought active, but, on the contrary, passive. Activity seems rather to be self-caused change. A transition that begins with, and comes out of, the thing itself is the process where we feel that it is active. The issue must, of course, be attributed to the thing as its adjective ”

“ I have never seen a use of the term which to my mind retained its sense if time-sequence is removed. We can, of course, talk of a power sustaining or producing effects, which are subordinate and yet not subsequent; but to talk thus is not to think. ”

“ And if it will not bear scrutiny, then it clearly does not represent reality.
There is a sense in which words like power, force, or energy, are distinguished from activity. They may be used to stand for something that does not happen at all, but somehow remains in a state of suspended animation, or in a region between non- existence and existence. I do not think it worth while to discuss this at present, and shall pass at once to the signification in which force means force in exercise—in other words, activity. ”

“ Yes, but that is one thing, and it is quite another thing to assert that really this mass does nothing. Certainly there is no logic which can warrant such a misuse of abstraction. The background of the whole world can be eliminated by no sound process, and the furthest conclusion which can be logical is that we need not consider it practically. As in a number of diverse cases it seems to add nothing special, we may for each purpose consider that it adds nothing at all. ”