Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/454

Rh physical processes of his organism, we get a view of the relation between the intellect and the will which is far more just, at once to the natural history of the mind, and to the deeper meaning of the inner life of our consciousness. View man as a natural being, and you find him adjusting himself to his environment, acting, as they say, in response to stimuli. The world influences his senses, only to awaken him to such functions as express his interest in this world. Now the whole life of the organism is precisely the life of adjustment. The physical activities accompanying consciousness so take place that the organism preserves itself, and expresses its natural bearing towards its world. And the whole life of consciousness, accompanying these adjustments, constitutes a more or less accurate knowledge of what the adjustments are. The life of our consciousness is therefore a life of watching our deeds, of estimating our deeds, of predicting our deeds, and of interpreting our whole world in terms of deeds. We observe no outer facts without at the same time more or less clearly observing our attitude towards those facts, our estimate of their value, our response to their presence, our intentions with respect to our future relations with these facts.

But, within the circle of this general unity of our consciousness, various distinctions indeed arise. Sometimes the outer fact, viewed more or less in abstraction from its value to ourselves, more completely fills the field of our consciousness, and then we are likely to talk of a state of relatively pure Knowledge. If our state is one in which an idea explicitly appears as attempting to correspond to the presupposed object of its own External Meaning,