a logical non-arbitrary manner, and are therefore prescribed or offered to us in such a way that we must use them; hence too there are “rules” for their combination which must not be “transgressed,” if we are not to be guilty of a wrong, awkward, incomprehensible, or at any rate clumsy, form of speech.
21. The spirit of language is one of the forms in which we recognise what we define as the social will. To recognise the nature of the social will is necessary in order to analyse the different senses in which it can be said of words or other social signs that they have a “meaning”. It is for this reason that we have premised the distinction between social will which has formed itself in a natural way, and that which is made consciously, we might almost say, arbitrarily. By social will in general we mean the will which is valid for a number of men, i.e., which determines their individual wills in the same sense, in so far as they themselves are thought of as subjects (originators or sustainers) of this will which is common to them and binds them together.
22. By individual human will we mean here every existing combination of ideas (thoughts and feelings) which, working independently, acts in such a way as to facilitate and hasten, or hinder and check, other (similar) combinations of ideas (makes them probable or improbable).
23. In this sense human will may be thought of as the cause of human activities or conscious omissions; for activities and conscious omissions are, from a psychological point of view, nothing but successions of ideas.
24. In these causal combinations of ideas the relatively constant elements are the feelings (affirmation or negation), and the relatively variable elements are the thoughts. The relation of the latter to the former must therefore constitute the principle of division and of classification. Upon this principle is based the dichotomy of the individual as of the social will. The will in which the feelings predominate we call natural, that in which thoughts predominate artificial. That is to say: in the one case the relation to the activities (to put it briefly) in which will in general “utters” or “realises” itself precedes more as a feeling—this may also be expressed by saying it is felt as an objectively present tendency,—in the other case it precedes more as a thought. As a feeling it is by nature indefinite and develops itself from general to particular relations. As thought, it starts from particular determinations and passes over into more general ones combined from them. From this antithesis we get the following characteristics. In the former—the feeling will—
