Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/503

 PHILOSOPHICAL TERMINOLOGY. 489 to the future, to a becoming, hence simply to a happening ; but it can without difficulty be generalised and refer also to the existent ; the common element is then the affirmation and in the opposite sense the negation of a state or of a change. Hereby it becomes identical with the feeling of pleasure and pain ; but these are indissolubly connected with desire and dislike, hope and fear, in short with all positive and negative "wishes," which are again condi- tioned by sensation, idea, thought of a future state. Thus, if we follow language, Will may be identified with or dis- tinguished from, all particular and connected sensations and thoughts ; it may be conceived of as something quite illogical, uiimediated (as actual "caprice" or fancy), but also on the other hand as a strictly logical, systematic structure. 81. Physiologists and Psychologists are always tormenting themselves with new investigations as to what it really is, but find again that "Desire, wish, will, are states of mind which every one knows, and which no definition can make plainer" (James). But then they are distinguished: (1) "We desire to feel, to have, to do, all sort of things which at the moment are not felt, had, or done; (2) if with the desire there goes a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply wish ; but (3) if we believe that the end (attainment) is in our power, we will that the desired feeling, having or doing shall be real ". We really have here an arbitrary limitation of customary language which would perhaps be not to blame if the author remained true to it ; but after a very thorough investigation he finds that the effort of attention is the essential phenomenon of the will, and thinks that every reader must know that it is so from his own experience. The first limitation still includes every " spontaneous " begin- ning of movement of the body, hence also those " involuntary " ones which follow immediately upon sensation or idea ; the others expressly make " stable " thought, held with exer- tion the condition of the will; here only the "voluntary" activities of human beings are thought of. Wundt too has previously declared that " the will can be defined as little as consciousness"; but then he took "apperception" or the "inner volitional activity which is given from the first with consciousness " as the decisive and alone sufficient characteristic of the concept, and from it he derived the " external " act of will as " apperception of a motor idea ". In his later (small) Psychologic he regards the process of will in quite a different way, defining it as an affection (a connected course of feeling of a uniform character) together