Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/413

 G. F. STOUT, Analytic Psychology. 397 conative processes. To know involves willing. To will involves knowing ends. To develop a process of conation means to become aware of an apperceptive system wherein means are con- sidered as in relation to an end, and partial acts are apprehended as parts of one whole action, whose schematic apprehension con- stitutes the unity of one's voluntary plans. The parallel life of cognition and conation (chap, vii., pp. 82-109) is at once a life of seeking ends, of becoming conscious of what they are, and of determining special acts and insights by reference to the whole whereof they form part, and whose implicit apprehension precedes and teleologically determines the apprehension and the existence of the partial volitions and cognitions. All this our author (p. 82) takes to be a verification of his own theses as to the causal efficacy observable within the conscious stream. For my own part I accept it all in so far as it is a description of that rich life of meanings, and of the evolution of meanings, which constitutes the very essence of both intellect and will ; but I find in all this nothing but the brute fact that consciousness, as it comes, finds itself full of meaning, and normally grows in meaning as it flows. The causal explanation of all this, in so far as there is one at all, belongs elsewhere. But the actual union of knowing and striving, of conation and cognition, of meaning as the attainment of insight, and of meaning as the fulfilment of hope and desire all this union I fully accept, and I also fully agree that, in the determination of all such unions and of all such meanings, the idea of the whole is always prior to the parts prior logically, prior teleologically, and prior just because if there is to be any meaning at all in consciousness the whole must appear there as prior to the parts. Very brilliant seems to me, furthermore, the vindication of similar principles in the descriptive analysis of the series of con- scious states in the cases where the revival of former "disposi- tions " is a condition of the present rational meaning of conscious states. Here (in chap, vi., pp. 43-81), under the title " Relative Suggestion," we learn that the reproduction of former states, if it is to serve the present ends of rationality, must be such as to be not, so to speak, literal, but rather formal, so that recalled wholes become capable of formal adaptation to present conditions, and so that new wholes can get formed through such adaptation of old forms (rather than of old contents) to the needs which present experiences determine. Examples of such revival of relative wholes, and of such adaptation of these wholes to new cases, we have in the power to sing an old melody in a new key, or other- wise to transfer a " pre-existing form of combination to new matter," matter with which the old form then, on occasion, blends, producing sometimes a result which may be very original, as a new poetic composition is original, although it retains the author's former style. This adaptive type of recall, whereby the past dispositions are not so much literally revived as plundered of their