Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/57

32 given to me as immediate contents of consciousness. They are defined for me by my consciousness that such and such further determination of my present actions would mean a completer expression of my will. The correlative of such completer action would be, as I hold, the experience of such and such, more or less completely defined, further contents of experience. And these further contents of experience constitute the facts that I acknowledge as real.

When I say to myself, “Such and such deeds, not now done by me, would more fully express my will,” my practical consciousness is the one which is summoned up by further saying, “Then I ought to tend, even now, towards such acts.” And the theoretical Ought of our judgments about facts, like the practical Ought of Ethics, is after all definable only in terms of what Kant called the Autonomy of the Will. I ought to do that which I even now, by implication, mean to do. My Ought is my own will more rationally expressed than, at the instant of a capricious activity, I as yet consciously recognize. The consciousness of the more rational purpose, — of a purpose looming up, as it were, in the distance, beyond my present impulses, and yet even now seen as their own culmination, like a mountain crowning the ascent from the foothills, — the consciousness, I say, of such a purpose, is what we mean in Ethics by the Ought. This Ought may appear foreign, but yet it is never at once the Ought and still something wholly foreign to my own will. Constraint, as such, is never moral obligation. The Ought is another will than my impulse, yet it is one with my own meaning; and it expresses more fully and rationally what my impulse even now implies. But if the practical Ought of Ethics is thus