Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/455

436 or to its own Other, we call the process one of Thought about External Reality. Sometimes, however, our acts themselves, viewed as efforts to alter the outside facts, come more clearly before us either for deliberate estimate, or for impulsive decision; and in such cases we find the narrow field of our consciousness more clearly taken up by what we call Will. But facts are never known except with reference to some value that they possess for our present or intended activities. And on the other hand, our voluntary activities are never known to us except as referring to facts to which we attribute in one way or another an intellectually significant Being, — a reality other than what is present to us at the moment.

It follows that when, for general purposes, we study, not the psychology, but, as at present, the total significance of our conscious life, we are much less interested in the separation between knowledge and will than in that unity which psychology already recognizes, and which philosophy finds of still more organic importance. Consequently, when, at the outset of these discussions, we pointed out the element of will in the constitution of ideas, we were dwelling upon precisely what for the psychologist appears as the intimate connection between the knowing process of the mind and the motor responses of the organism to its environment. When we know, we have in the first place present to our minds certain contents, certain data, certain facts, it may be of the outer senses, it may be of the memory and the imagination. But if rational knowledge takes place, these data are not merely present, but they also take on forms; they