Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/332

 316 ALEXANDER F. SHAND : may be provoked by an imperative like the will of another man. And how often these imperatives seem to us to have an extrinsic source, and to be the echoes within of the will of the gods or our fellow-men without. We do not at first identify such inward voices with ourself. As when we think, the opinions of other men occur to us as not our own opinions, as not yet affirmed or denied by our judgment, so before we will the commands of our parents and those whom we venerate, and the codes of society or religion, often occur to us, as not commands proceeding from ourself, and not yet consented to or rejected by our will. And so the imperative is always a stimulus to our will or conation, or to the will or conation of other men. But is itself ever a volition ? Or, in other words, as there are categorical, disjunctive and hypothetical types of will, are there also im- perative volitions? If there be, they seem only to occur where the object of the imperative is to control the conduct of another person and not our own. But sometimes the imperative mood is only a short and abrupt expression of desire. " Come and see me," may mean, " I desire," not, "I command it". Only the form is imperative ; the meaning is different. At other times the meaning is im- perative. An undoubted command is given, and understood as such both by the person addressing it and the person to whom it is addressed. And we recognise this as volition. But often where we give an order, as in our simple categorical volitions, we are not conscious of any other desire, except the one which we direct shall be satisfied. We are not think- ing of the desires of the person we address, and whether these are antagonistic to our own. From the habit of giving orders to our subordinates, we give them without thinking of their feelings, so long as the order belongs to the class which we are accustomed to give and they to obey. In this case the imperative is a simple volition. But at other times we become clearly conscious of a conation in them which our imperative is meant to restrain. If a child is doing what he is not permitted to do, he is told to desist. Or if we anticipate that he is going to do it, we remind him that the action is forbidden. In such cases there seem to be two ideas present the idea which we foresee the child is going to do and the contrary idea of the conduct which we pre- scribe. The one idea is expressive of a conation in ourselves ; the other of a conation in the child. Can we ever choose between two conations, one of which is in ourselves, the other in the mind of another person ? We should answer this question in the negative. Only so far as the conation