Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/504

 490 FERDINAND TONNIES : with the ultimate end issuing from it of a sudden change of the idea- and feeling-content. Finally in the deep exposi- tions of his System he takes the will in a sense which is expressly based upon parallelism, or indeed upon identity of body and soul ; it becomes the psychical content of life, sometimes distinguished as the "pure will," a " transcendental soul-concept, which empirical Psychology demands as the ultimate ground of the unity of psychical processes, but of which it can make absolutely no use for its purposes ". "If it would gain from it a soul-concept useful for the empirical derivation of the facts of inner experience, it must forthwith extend it into a composite unity including the possibility of a plurality of presentative activities." For the most part the physiologists adhere to a concept of the will, which makes it, after the fashion of the Cartesian soul, a rational person within the body; they like to represent it as tele- graphing and issuing orders. But some, like Huxley, are consistent and materialistic enough to think of all animal, hence also human, activities as " automatic," and of all " phenomena of consciousness " as mere by-products of the vital process, reacting in no way upon it. They differ from the Identity-psychology only in the obstinately maintained prejudice that only the objective or physical is "real" i.e. they differ fundamentally only in terminology; for no one has ever been able to say in what particular sense the former has a right to be called real, while the psychical " accompani- ment " has not. We regard Wundt's latest exposition, together with its terminology, as very fruitful ; but even Wundt has not yet given us a psychology which develops and derives the particular and most particular human wills from the universal and pure will, according to the given programme. Even for Wundt the name remains previous to the concept, or at any rate simultaneous with it. But it is for ever in vain to hunt after that which the will really is. To obtain a fundamental view of the facts, that is the only important task ; and that indeed is made very difficult by the fact that we can express them only in words which already mean something else. But we might try to avoid such words, to form the concept entirely from words already defined, and then to assign to it the abbreviating name, e.g. " Will ". It is in this way that we have endeavoured though anticipating concepts to determine as the human individual will that combination of ideas which is in any way " positing " (quasi legislative) for, or " effects," subsequent ideas and combinations of ideas, we may now say, which contain them in it as possible ; it may be that it completes and exhausts