Let us consider once more the factors present in the agent's final
survey of the situation after the completion of the judgment-process and
on the verge of action. These factors are, as we have seen, (1)
recognition of conditions sanctioning the purpose formed, (2)
recognition of the purpose as, in view of this sanction, warranted to
the "energetic" self as an eligible method of expansion and development,
and (3) recognition of the "energetic" self, conversely, as in
possession, in virtue of the favorable conditions given in factual
judgment, of this new method of furtherance. These three factors are
manifestly not so much factors co-operating in the situation as
inseparable aspects of it distinguishable from each other and admitting
of discriminative emphasis in accordance with the degree of reflective
power which the individual may possess or choose to exercise. Strictly
speaking these three aspects are present in every conscious recognition
of a purpose as one's own and as presently to be carried into effect,
but they are not always present in equal conspicuousness, and never with
equal logical importance for the individual. In fact this enumeration of
aspects coincides with our enumeration of the three stages in the
evolution of the individual's conscious moral attitude toward new
purposes given in impulse--in the third of which the last named of these
aspects comes to the fore with the others in logical or functional
subordination to it.
Now it will be apparent on grounds of logic, as on the evidence of
simple introspection, that in this third type of attitude--in the
attitude of true valuation, that is to say--the energetic self cannot be
identified with the chosen purpose. The purpose is a determinate
specified act to be performed subject to recognized conditions, and with
the use of the co-ordinated means; the self, on the other hand, is a
process to which this particular purpose is, indeed, from the standpoint
of the self's conservation and increase, indispensable, but which is
nevertheless apart from the purpose in the sense that without the
purpose it would still be a self, though perhaps a narrower and less
developed one. Our standpoint here as elsewhere, the reader must
remember, is the logical. It is the standpoint of the agent's own
interpretation of his experience of judgment during the judgment-process
and at its close, and not the standpoint of the psychological mediation
of this experience as a series of occurrences. Thus we are here far from
wishing to deny the general proposition that a man's purposes are an
expression of his nature, as the psychologist might describe it, or the
proposition that a man's conduct and his character are one and the same
thing viewed from different points of view. We wish merely to insist
upon the fact that these psychological propositions are not a true
account of the agent's own experience of himself and of his purposes
_while these latter are in the making or are on the verge of execution_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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