Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/456

Rh constitute ideal structures; they fulfil our own purposes. These purposes consciously correspond either to what an ordinary observer would call our visible responses to our environment, or to what a psychologist, who looks closer than an ordinary observer, would find also to involve memories, or hints, or fragments, of former adjustments. The result is, so far, that, when we know, the facts both of sense and of imagination unite in our minds, into the expression of a Plan of Action. And thus the knowing process is a process partially embodying our own will. Upon such an analysis of the nature of ideas all the foregoing discussion has been founded; and now we deliberately repeat and emphasize this interpretation in order to make way for a final statement of the place of the will in our doctrine of being.

From this point of view, then, the contrast between knowledge and will, within our own conscious field, is so far this; viz., that we speak of our conscious process as a Knowing, in so far as all the data are woven into one unity of consciousness; while we speak of this same process as Will, in so far as this unity of consciousness involves a fulfilment or embodiment of a purpose. The word “Meaning” very properly lays stress upon both of these aspects at once. For what we call a Meaning is at once something observed with clearness as an unity of many facts, and something also intended as the result which fulfils a purpose. But when we take account of External Meanings, we speak of Thought in so far as we seek correspondence to our presupposed Other, and of Will in so far as we seek to produce the Other that shall correspond to the Internal Meaning.