Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/64

Rh that must be whose denial conflicts with what is already recognized as actual. If I am this way of willing, then one can express the fact in terms of a must. In one aspect my will may indeed possess freedom. In another aspect I am obviously as much under “constraint” in willing as in any other aspect of my conscious life. Only the constraint is not wholly external. It is my own. If I were to find my hand too near the fire, I should will to withdraw it, and should express my will in struggles if another man constrained me. But my willing itself, my determination to struggle for my freedom, would here be as clear a case of something that I just then must will, from the very internal nature of my will, as the act of my enemy who held my hand towards the fire would be the case of a condition externally forced upon my attention. In such a case I will, but to say that I also must will thus, is to express an aspect of what my will actually and consciously includes. So, too, it is in case of our disappointed lover, whose will gives his mistress power over him. His love is his will, but just now he must love. So our acknowledgment of the Ought is an act of will, but there may be a must bound up with this acknowledgment. Will is not mere wavering. It has a determinate nature. And whatever has a definite character, is such that you can express certain aspects of this character in terms of what you then call necessity.

The category of the Ought thus has two aspects, and implies their unity. The aspects are those which, in our