apart from the inner nature which comes out in the result, activity has no meaning. If this nature was not there, and was not real in the thing, is the thing really active? But when we press this question home, and insist on having something more than insincere metaphors, we find either nothing, or else the idea which we are pleased to entertain. And this, as an idea, we dare not attribute to the thing, and we do not know how to attribute it as anything else. But a confusion of this kind cannot belong to reality.
Throughout this chapter I have ignored a certain view about activity. This view would admit that activity, as we have discussed it, is untenable; but it would add that we have not even touched the real fact. And this fact, it would urge, is the activity of a self, while outside self the application of the term is metaphorical. And, with this question in prospect, we may turn to another series of considerations about reality.
