Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/39

No. I.] the whole truth. To suppose that it is, is to fall into a mistake similar to that of Descartes when he defined matter as pure extension. For, when we look carefully at the nature of desire, we find that it derives its character from the self-conscious activity of the subject. The impulse to satisfy the craving of hunger is not desire, in the sense in which desire is a motive to action. The impulse becomes desire only by reference to the consciousness of my personal good as conceived to demand gratification of the natural impulse. Eliminate the idea of the self as it is presented by an act of thought, and the natural impulse may still remain, and may even be followed by the instinctive movement of seizing and eating the food within reach, but there will be no act properly so called. Desire involves the interpretive power by which the relation of food to my physical well-being, and indirectly to my moral well-being, is presented to my consciousness. Thus, in having a desire I have already gone beyond the mere consciousness of a certain event. Desire is, however, not yet volition, but only the idea of a possible volition. This possibility is translated into actuality in the act by which I determine myself in conformity with the ideal of myself which I have formed. This act of self-determination is my motive, and hence to have a motive and to be free is the same thing. That Kant should have found it necessary to seek for the preservation of freedom by denying to man all knowledge of his own nature as it really is, is only another instance of the, that the highest knowledge of the real which we can attain is that of a series of events in time. As we have seen, the abstract opposition of the phenomenal and the real disappears when we see that the phenomenal is simply the real as it first appears to us in the earlier phases of our thought. Thus every conception of the world, short of that which includes and yet transcends all the rest, may be called a knowledge of the phenomenal; but, in this sense, the phenomenal must ultimately vanish in the real.

QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY.