Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/347

328 Such search for one’s own will often occupies, in the practical life of youth, some very anxious years. Idleness, defective modes of conduct, self-defeating struggles without number, fickle loves that soon die out, may long accompany what the youth himself all the while regards as the search for his own will, for the very soul of his own inner and conscious purposes. In such cases one may surely err as to one’s intent. The false or fickle love is a sort of transient dream of the coming true love itself. The transient choice is a shadow of the coming true choice. But how does one’s own real intent, the object at such times of one’s search, stand related to one’s present and ill-defined vague restlessness, or imperfectly conscious longing. I answer, one’s true will, one’s genuine purpose, one’s object here sought for, can be nothing whatever but one’s present imperfect conscious will in some more determinate form. What one has, at such times, is the will of the passing moment, — an internal meaning, consciously present as far as it goes. And now it is this will and no other that one seeks to bring to clearer consciousness. But what other, what external meaning, what fact beyond, yes, what object, is the goal of this quest? I answer, nothing whatever in heaven or in earth but this present imperfect internal meaning rendered more determinate, less ambiguous in its form, less a general longing, more a precisely united and determinate life. And this, once rendered perfectly determinate, would be what the man in question calls “My life according to my conscious will.”

Well, this case of the vague purpose that one seeks, not to abandon, but to get present to the moment’s con-