transport myself to next Christmas. That I can only desire. But I can will to begin planning and preparing for Christmas. And just so I can now will to express myself in these words, and behold, in one popular sense of the word “will,” the will is the deed.
Here is no place for a psychological analysis of these three aspects of what is popularly regarded as volition. But one may say, at once, that all three aspects come to us, primarily, as facts of human experience, coloured through and through by the special conditions of our human mental life. For instance, the phenomena felt by us as the phenomena of efficacious effort are, as is now known, not the phenomena that cause our voluntary acts, so much as the mere effects of conduct. The sense of efficacious effort is very largely, if not wholly, due to kinaesthetic sensory states, of widely varied peripheral origin, — muscle, joint, skin sensations, visual experiences, sensations of breathing, of general bodily movement, etc.; states which really result either from the acts that they seem to produce or from our mere memories of the results of former deeds. Such states no more throw light upon any metaphysical efficaciousness of the will than the sense of smell informs us as to the doings of the archangels. But the numerous writers who have conceived our experiences of efficacious effort as in themselves apt to reveal the very essence of the relation of cause and effect have too readily applied these same human experiences to the purpose of conceiving even the very essence of the Divine Will, and the relation between the Creator’s act and the world’s processes, as seen from
