Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/461

442 the outset. Our original example, that of the melody sung, for the sake of the mere delight in singing, remains for us typical of the entire life of what one may call consciously free and internally unrestricted finite ideas. Now what we in the first place have asserted in regard to such ideas, is that, precisely in so far as they are whole ideas, they stand before our consciousness as present fulfilments of purpose.

Any mere purpose, so far as it is still relatively fragmentary, or is, so to speak, disembodied, or is a mere striving, begins, in any such empirical case, the little drama that is acted within the momentary limits of a finite consciousness. In saying that this, at first disembodied purpose, becomes expressed, whenever any consciousness of such an act passes from its earlier to its later temporal stages, — I merely report what happens. I make as yet simply no assertion with regard to any psychological or physical causation. I assert as yet, in such a case, no effective force. I mention nothing of the nature of a physical or psychical tendency such that, by the mere necessity of its nature, it must work itself out. What my consciousness finds when I sing or speak is that a certain meaning actually gets expressed. My act of singing takes place. At once, then, there are data present, there are facts of consciousness, and there is this significance which these facts embody. Whether the facts could have come into existence in this way unless a given nervous organism or a given psychical entity, endowed with specific powers, subject to general laws, were already in existence, of all that my finite consciousness in the present moment tells me nothing. To assert any such thing is