Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/62

Rh answered by such a retort as, for example, the following: “Surely, you cannot help believing as you now do in these physical and social facts, in these rocks and hills, in these fellow-men, and in the rest of your well-known world. Therefore, it is not of your own will that you thus acknowledge their presence. If it were, you could cease, at pleasure, to believe in their existence. For if it is your will that causes your belief, your will could, if it chose, cause a change of belief, and at pleasure you could instead acknowledge the truth of the Arabian Nights tales, and believe yourself a dweller in Sirius. As a fact, you must believe in the facts of common sense, whether you will or no.”

I reply to such an objection, first, that I do not call our will the cause of our present recognition of an external reality, and so still less the wholly free cause of this recognition, as if the will were a power that could now of a sudden change all our beliefs. What I say is that our present recognition of the concrete things in which we all believe is not a mere acceptance of any content of sense, but does include an intention to act, and does fulfil, as far as it goes, a purpose, and our own conscious purpose. How we came to get this purpose I do not here in the least care to explain by the hypothesis of any natural or supernatural causal process. Still less do I care now what psychological conditions enable the purpose to get itself expressed in our special beliefs. I report the observable inner facts, as the singer observes his own singing. It is so. I care not now what causes made it so. All our doctrines about causes, and about causation, whatever they are, are instances of just