ABSTRACT
I fancy that other contributors to this volume besides myself may have been in one respect a trifle embarrassed—though in other respects much aided—by the Editor's invitation to bear in mind the directive concerning choice of subject that was addressed by his predecessor to the contributors to the 1924 volume. Ageing philosophers at any rate are likely already to have written a good deal about what they take to be ‘the main problem of philosophy’, and to have illustrated therein what is ‘central in their own speculation upon it’. And it may well be that they feel doubtful whether they have much that is fresh to say on the subject. That, I fear, is to an appreciable extent my own case with regard to the two problems (I cannot easily distinguish between them in order of importance) which I personally should pick out as the key problems of philosophy; viz. the epistemological problem of ‘the unit of cognition’, and the metaphysico-moral problem of ‘free will’. I judge it best, therefore not to write directly about either of them. It will, I trust, be sufficiently conformable with the general plan of this volume if I investigate instead what might be called a ‘background’ problem to the problem of free will—the problem of the general nature of that ‘self-activity’ of which, in my view, ‘free will’ is a particular mode. I welcome the opportunity of doing this, for it seems to me that the notion of activity has received much less than its due share of attention from contemporary British philosophers, and that insufficiently examined assumptions about it are apt to play an important part in the attitude one adopts towards the free will problem. In this paper I shall touch hardly at all upon the free will problem in a direct way; but I venture to hope that, indirectly, the examination of the notion of activity which follows, inadequate though it will certainly be, may do something to reinforce the view of free will which I have tried to defend elsewhere.
