The experience of activity.

Discusses the experience of activity. Radical empiricism with its pragmatic methods and principle of pure experience has been used to explain such experiences. Elementary activity means the fact of event or change, which comes with desire and a sense of goal and is complicated with resistances and the efforts which resistance provokes. In complex experiences like these, notions of distinct agents and passivity, along with notions of causal efficacy arise. Philosophers have argued for three principle types of activity: (1) with will as the agent and action its purpose, (2) with ideas as the agents and the prevalence of one set of them as the action, and (3) with nerve cells as the agents, and motor discharges as the action. The inner nature of both efficacy and activity are superficial problems; the urgent problems of activity being more concrete and concerned with the relation of longer-span to shorter-span activities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)