beloved, or a man in despair wills to commit suicide. But in such cases one really wills an already familiar deed, — such as jumping into the water, or making to a lady such pretty speeches as one already knows how to make. In these cases, it is the situation that is novel, not the act really willed. I repeat, the will is wholly unoriginal. But, on the other hand, when you will, you turn possibility into actuality by dwelling upon one or another various already known and abstractly conceivable possibilities. The essence of the will is here not inventiveness, but attention. Choice is explicitly an attentive selection of one conceived possibility as that upon which you dwell, as against opposing possibilities. Even Desire, in its least rational forms, involves this element of attentive favouring of one conscious content as against a more or less dimly recognised background of other contents. In case of efficacious bodily efforts, you always attend closely to the deed that you most try to perform. Surely if one defined Will, apart from its endless human complications, as a process involving attention to one conscious content rather than to another, or, on higher levels, as the preference of a datum attended to, as over against data that remain, relatively speaking, merely ideal or possible objects of attention, — one would have a preliminary definition that would promise most as a basis for wider generalisation.
Our conception of Will thus once generalised, it remains to re-examine our conception of the Absolute, in order to see whether the conception of a complete Whole of Experience does not involve, as one of its moments, a factor worthy of the name “Will.”
