Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/453

434 what we have from the outset called an act of will as well as an act of knowledge. It is essential to our entire understanding of our Fourth Conception of Being, that we should remember the truth in both of these aspects, not dividing the aspects themselves, nor confounding their significance.

A few words of purely psychological analysis may then be, at this point, useful, to clarify the precise relations between intellectual and voluntary processes in our ordinary consciousness.

Popular psychology long since far too sharply sundered the Intellect and the Will in the empirical processes of the finite human mind. Viewing the intellect as a passive reception of the truth, defining the will as the power to alter facts, the popular psychology was forced, almost from the outset, to make an effort to reunite the powers that it had thus falsely separated. For a very little consideration shows not only that we can will to know, but also that we are in general guided, in our intellectual processes, by the very interests which popular psychology refers to the will. On the other hand, our voluntary processes, if they are conscious, are themselves matters of knowledge. For our conscious volition implies that we know what we will. In consequence of these obvious considerations, a more modern psychology has been led to its well-known doctrine that all such psychological divisions are rather distinctions between different aspects of the same process, than means for telling us of naturally sundered or even of separable processes. If we regard the human subject, in the ordinary psychological way, as a being whose conscious life runs parallel with the highest