The reader who recalls our discussions on activity, will remember how it literally was riddled by contradictions. All the puzzles as to adjectives and relations and terms, every dilemma as to time and causation, seemed to meet in it and there even to find an addition. Far from reducing these to harmony, activity, when we tried to think it, fell helplessly asunder or jarred with itself. And to suppose that the self is to bring order into this chaos, after our experience hitherto of the self’s total impotence, seems more sanguine than rational.
If now we take force or cause, as it is revealed in the self, to be the same as volition proper, that clearly will not help us. For in volition we have an idea, determining change in the self, and so producing its own realization.[1] Volition perhaps at first sight may seem to promise a solution of our metaphysical puzzles. For we seem to find at last something like a self-contained cause with an effect within itself. But this surely is illusory. The old difficulties about the beginning of change and its process in time, the old troubles as to diversity in union with sameness—how is any one of these got rid of, or made more tractable? It is bootless to enquire whether we have found a principle which is to explain the universe. For we have not even found anything which can bear its own weight, or can endure for one moment the most superficial scrutiny. Volition gives us, of course, an intense feeling of reality; and we may conclude, if we please, that in this lies the heart of the mystery of things. Yes, perhaps; here lies the answer—for those who may have understood; and the whole question turns on whether we have reached an understanding. But what you offer me appears much more like an experience, not understood but interpreted into hopeless confusion. It is with you as with the man who, transported by his
- ↑ I have discussed the nature of will psychologically in Mind, No. 49.
