Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/40

Rh chological analyses of the mere contents of our consciousness, — analyses which have become prominent in recent discussion. What is often called the active and sometimes also the motor aspect of our mental life, has been much dwelt upon of late. This is no place, and at present we have no need, for a psychological theory of the origin or of the causes of what is called activity, but as a fact, you have in your mental life a sort of consciousness accompanying the processes by which, as the psychologists are accustomed to say, you adjust your organism to its environment; and this sort of consciousness differs, in some notable features, from what takes place in your mind in so far as the mere excitation of your sense organs by the outer world is regarded apart from the experiences that you have when you are said to react upon your impressions. The difference between merely seeing your friend, or hearing his voice, and consciously or actively regarding him as your friend, and behaving towards him in a friendly way, is a difference obvious to consciousness, whatever your theory of the sources of mental activity. Now this difference between outer sense impressions, or images derived from such impressions, and active responses to sense impressions, or ideas founded upon such responses, is not merely a difference between what is sometimes called the intellect, and what is called the will. For, as a fact, the intellectual life is as much bound up with our consciousness of our acts as is the will. There is no purely intellectual life, just as there is no purely voluntary life. The difference between knowledge and will, so far as it has a