Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/187

THE DEFINITION OF WILL. 173 And again it does not imply agency on the part of the object. That agency and my struggle, I repeat, may perhaps in fact exist, but they are not contained so far as such within my experience. And I have feelings and those feelings may more or less qualify the not-self, but, once more, not so as to produce a perception of agency. We may find an illus- tration in my state as theoretical or perceptive. Where knowledge develops itself in me without effort or friction, my experience even here is very far from being simple. But my attitude, so far as I tranquilly receive the object's development, and so far again as that development is not viewed as its agency, is an example of what we mean by simple passivity. 1 And we have a perception of activity which remains on the same level. In this, as we saw, I perceive my self to be enlarged at the expense of the not-self. But whatever feel- ing may accompany and may qualify this process, I do not perceive the not-self as striving or myself upon the other side as doing something to this not-self. Thus, in my theoretic attitude again, the unknown existence is beyond me as a not-self, and my knowledge of it can come to me as an expansion of myself at its cost. And yet my attitude so far involves no experience of resistance or of agency. We found another instance in what I may perceive on relief from a pain, although the cessation of the pain is not viewed as my doing. And we saw that activity and passivity in this lower sense are turned by a small addition into that which implies agency and will. 2 This addition in each case consists in an idea of the result, an idea which going before carries itself out in the process. These subtleties, however wearisome, cannot I think be safely neglected. We have often what may be called an 1 1 refer to that state of mind in which the object comes to me as something which is, without my feeling at the time that it is doing anything to me, or I to it or again to myself. 2 If we imagine a dog beginning to run, we may suppose that with this he gets at once a perception of activity (Cf. Appearance, p. 606). His experience however at first need not amount to agency proper. But the perceived expansion of self into the not-self will tefed naturally to become an idea, and that idea of the result will tend to precede and to qualify beforehand the process. And, with such a self-developing idea of a changed not-self, the dog would have forthwith the experience of agency. The same ideal construction can of course be also made from the outside by a spectator, and can then be attributed, perhaps falsely, to the actual subject of the process. In the passage of my book to which I have just referred I have not distinguished between the two senses of activity referred to above.