and in that act his will is present, his will being himself, and neither a part of himself nor a certain disposition of elements not in a self, but the whole self expressing itself in a particular way, manifesting itself as will in this or that utterance, and, in and by such manifestation, qualifying the will which manifests itself. The will must be in the act, and the act in the will; and as the will is the self which remains the same self, therefore the act, which was part of the self, is now part of the self, since the self is that which it has done. We say ‘I will,’ and we mean something by it. We distinguish ‘I’ and ‘will.’ ‘I’ is what we always say, when we speak of thinking or doing at all, and ‘will’ means now some particular act which we will. And again in ‘I will’ we unite ‘I’ and ‘will,’ in such a way that the notion of dividing them is absurd; when of each it can be said that the one is in the other, partition is out of the question. ‘I’ was there, as a solid individual; then, when a particular act was before it, ‘I’ became to us that which included and was wider than this, that, or the other possible particulars; and lastly, in ‘I will’ there is no particular nor universal apart, but an inseparable whole. The vulgar, as we know, are the prey of delusions, which we think our ‘inductive’ psychology, and our anti-metaphysical metaphysic, and our all too metaphysical ‘Baconian’ science make impossible for ourselves; and the sole possible expression of the one most widely spread amongst all these rooted beliefs is this, that an universal is real, and that that universal is conscious of itself.
We said that our Necessitarians ignored the self, both as willing self and as self-same will. Let us begin with the first. We saw (to repeat it) that ‘the will must be in the act, and the act in the will’; and phrases of this sort, which express the beliefs of the vulgar mind, should warn us that either we are living in an universe of ‘figments,’ or else that in the world we have entered no physical theories, which apply to things outside of each other in space, are likely to avail us. And so when we hear such phrases as ‘the mechanism of the human mind,’ we feel at a loss, if at least we believe that the sphere of mere mechanism has ceased, before that of the mind has even begun; and when, further, we learn the avowed intention to bring nothing but physical methods to bear on the interpretation of mind,
