70 
C. L. Herrick 
tions as makes of the whole a complete organism, every part 
being implicate in every other. The complete organism is the 
ground’’ of all being, and is the only thinkable cause.^^ 
25. Reality is the affirmation of attribute. Reality in terms 
of experience reduces to an affirmation (subjective) of attri- 
bute (objective) and the attribute is always a^^doing”oractivity.^^ 
Lotze says : 
We cannot make mind equivalent to the infinitive ^‘to think,’’ but 
feel that it must be that which thinks; the essence of things cannot be 
either existence or activity; it must be that which exists and acts. 
Thinking means nothing, if it is not the act of a thinker; acting and work- 
ing mean nothing, if, in endeavoring to conceive them, we leave out the 
conception of a subject distinguishable from them from which they 
proceed. 
On the contrary, it is impossible to conceive of a subject dis- 
tinguishable from its acts or properties The doing 
of things in a constant way or according to some law of action is 
the most real thing we know of. A modern printing-press with 
its bewildering multitude of activities is a very real thing, and 
the most real thing about it is the doing of all these correlated 
acts for a common end. We may say that these processes are 
the products of certain wheels and levers. But these wheels and 
levers produce their result primarily by virtue of their arrange- 
ment, the result of activities; and even the properties of the metals, 
to which in our search for the subject it at last reduces, prove 
to be activities. In fine, we discover that the printing-press, 
so far as we can know it, reduces to correlated activities working 
harmoniously to some intelligible end. 
So of energy and matter, ^^Wliat has our postulated material 
entity done to it? It has added no matter to it. It has sub- 
tracted no force from it. . . . All that remains of our postu- 
lated materiality is form of motion or activity. . . . The 
impossibility of discriminating essence from form or kind of 
activity. . . . The discrimination of essence from attri- 
Discussed at length in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific 
Methods, vol. 1, 1904, pp. 596-600. 
See Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 1, 1904, p. 377; 
also “The Logical and Psychological Distinction between the True and the Real,’’ 
Psychological Review, vol. 11, no. 3, May, 1904, pp. 205-210. 
