Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/337

 TYPES OF WILL. 321 the discovery of these alternative phrases, so far from having resolved the imperative into a categorical judgment, it persists as the indispensable basis of that judgment. From our failure to analyse the imperative as will, we infer that, like negation and the types of judgment, like the distinction between pleasure and pain, and the distinctive varieties of sensation, it is a differentiation of thought, or more correctly of thought and will, of which we may per- haps furnish a genetic, but never an analytic explanation. VII. DESIRE AND WILL. In all volitions, according to the common opinion of psy- chologists, we either desire their immediate result or some remoter consequence. But our situation may be so desperate that, instead of a choice between desires, we have only a choice between aversions. A woman may have to choose between death and dishonour. A man suffering from an incurable disease may prefer the alternative of suicide ; and a condemned man has sometimes been permitted to select the manner of his death. He may have an aversion to death in every form ; and if we take aversion to mean desire to escape from an object, he has several such desires. He desires to escape from death altogether, and each death, as he imagines it, he shrinks from. But a power that heeds not his desires holds him fast. Powerless and despairing, he cannot will to escape from it. There is no good that he can choose ; he can only avoid the greater evil. Some death appears to him less horrible than others. His aversion to it is less strong, and he perforce selects it. In this type, there is a volition present and even a rational choice ; but can we find any desire for the death selected ? We may say that the motive which determines the man's choice is desire to escape the greater evil. He sees a course that offers him escape. He therefore desires to follow that course. But this argument is based on a false simplification of his state of mind. Desire may indeed be present in the state anteceding his volition ; but at the moment of will it is transformed into aversion. He desires to escape the greater evil : he desires also to escape the less ; and the course which he represents as an escape from the greater is that which leads directly to the less. Were it not for the less, he would desire to follow this course ; but the presence of this evil at the end of it transforms desire into aversion. Were it not for the greater evil at the opposite end, he would desire to retrace his steps ; but the presence of this greater 21