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TYPES OF WILL. 293 indirectly aids its realisation, we may will not to attend to it. And not to attend to it means that we shall attend else- where, to objects among which it is not found, from which it is absent. But can we give any positive interpretation of absence? If you are trying to restrain a reflex tendency, as the impulse to yawn or cough, the object of your volition is that the yawn or cough shall not become fact. Being an idea, it shall at most remain an idea, and shall be absent from the circle of what we call fact. But ' absence ' means that it is not within the circle. What then is there positive about your volition ? Are you willing to maintain the status quo, to permit the idea of the event, but not the event itself? Even in this case the negative element reap- pears as complement of the positive ; for you cannot think of maintaining the status quo without thinking that certain changes which would destroy it shall not take place. Thus we cannot resolve negative volition into positive, even where we can show that the one logically implies the other. The positive is only a complement of it, and is incapable of sup- plying its place. Negative thought is unique, and this fact accounts for that type of volition in which the uniqueness of negative thought is employed in the characterisation of the end. This uniqueness of negative thought penetrates also con- ations which are not will. What we call aversion seems to be a combination of desire and negative thought. If I have aversion for anything, I desire to escape from it ; not to be near it, not to see it. If I have aversion for an end, I desire not to accomplish it. There are then negative desires as well as negative volitions. In the treatment of negative thought, which has been so closely associated with logic, we must guard against confusing the distinct characters of logical and psychological analysis. In logic, negative thought necessarily involves a positive and positive thought a negative. If we have asserted that a man is honest, we are logically bound to deny that he forges other people's signatures or cheats at cards. The validity of the positive assertions involves the validity of the negative assertions, and conversely every negative involves some positive assertion. Logical analysis endeavours to discover what a content of thought involves or presupposes. It does not regard this content as an existing psychical fact, nor the judgments it presupposes as existing co-presented psychical facts. Psychology, on the other hand, deals with thought only as a psychical fact occurring in an individual mind, and having that specific character which justifies our designating