Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/63

38 such expressions of rational purposes, — not means of explaining the fundamental fact that rational purposes get expressed in our conscious life. The so-called axiom of causation, or even the more generally stated “principle of sufficient reason,” is only one of the forms in which the Idea gets partially embodied in our thought about things. And the only warrant for believing in such a principle at all is the Ought, whose deepest basis lies in our fundamental assurance that all reality embodies purpose. So I do not base my view on the assertion that the will causes our beliefs and is free to change them. I point out simply that to believe as we do about men and things seems just now more reasonable to us than does any other belief which we chance to have in mind as an alternative. But seeming reasonable means seeming to fulfil a purpose. And I prove my doctrine not only by this appeal to consciousness, but, indirectly, by letting my opponent try to refute me. If he does so, it soon appears that he rejects my account as something that seems to him unreasonable, i.e. as something that ought not to be held, just as our realist, in our former discussion, was found appealing to the “sanity” of his beliefs, to their usefulness for practical human purposes, as part of his warrant for maintaining that the reality is independent of all purposes. One thus refutes our doctrine of the Ought only by appealing to it. All logical discussion is, in fact, appeal to a norm, and a norm is a teleological standard.

Meanwhile, to say that my will is just now expressed in a given way, is by no means equivalent to denying that, in large measure, I must just now will thus. For