Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/55

30 merely because his mistress rejects him, but because he wills to love her. If he did not so will, she could not reject him, and would lose her “compelling” character altogether. She controls his will by his own connivance. All this we saw in general in our former consideration of the concept of Being. It follows, however, that no account of the categories of experience, which founds our consciousness of facts solely upon our experience of their compulsory or foreign character, can be just to the nature of knowledge. What we experience is, in one aspect, always our own will to be compelled by facts.

The most universal character, belonging to all the various types of concrete facts that we recognize, is accordingly a synthesis of their so-called “stubborn” or “foreign” character, with their equally genuine character as expressions of our own purpose. A fact is for me, at any moment, that which I ought to recognize as determining or as limiting what I am here consciously to do or to attempt. For a particular fact I recognize, at any moment, only in connection with a particular attempt at action. This is the obverse aspect of what is denned, in Psychology, as the principle that all our cognitive processes accompany “responses to our environment.” In explaining, for psychological purposes, the natural history of cognition, one presupposes an environment whose facts already have a recognized form of existence. One supposes also a conscious process as an existent fact, whose development is to be described. The basis of one’s description is then the principle that the external facts, which are supposed directly or indirectly to determine the conscious process, arouse responses in the