An act comprises an event and its immediate mental cause. The event is generally spoken of as the outward act, but this term seems to be too narrow, since the intentional production of a mental fact--for instance, a sensation, or an idea, or an emotion like joy or sorrow or anger--may be properly styled an act. The objection will perhaps be raised that I confound acts with their consequences, and that what I call the "event" is, as Austin maintains, nothing but bodily movements. But Austin himself admits that he must often speak of "acts" when he means "acts and their consequences," since "most of the names which seem to be names of acts, are names of acts, coupled with certain of their consequences, {204} and it is not in our power to discard these forms of speech."[4] I regard the so-called consequences of acts, in so far as they are intended, as acts by themselves, or as parts of acts. [Footnote 4: Austin, _Lectures on Jurisprudence_, i. 427, 432 _sq._] The very expression "outward act" implies that acts also have an inner aspect. Intention, says Butler, "is part of the action itself."[5] By intention I understand a volition or determination to realise the idea of a certain event; hence there can be only one intention in one act. Certain writers distinguish between the immediate and the remote intentions of an act. Suppose that a tyrant, when his enemy jumped into the sea to escape him, saved his victim from drowning with a view to inflicting upon him more exquisite tortures. The immediate intention, it is maintained, was to save the enemy from drowning, the remote intention was to inflict upon him tortures.[6] But I should say that, in this case, we have to distinguish between two acts, of which the first was a means of producing the event belonging to the second, and that, when the former was accomplished, the latter was still only in preparation. A distinction has, moreover, been drawn between the direct and the indirect intention of an act:--"If a Nihilist seeks to blow up a train containing an Emperor and others, his direct intention may be simply the destruction of the Emperor, but indirectly also he intends the destruction of the others who are in the train, since he is aware that their destruction will be necessarily included along with that of the Emperor."[7] In this case we have two intentions, and, so far as I can see, two acts, provided that the nihilist succeeded in carrying out his intentions, namely (1) the blowing up of the train, and (2) the killing of the emperor; the former of these acts does not even necessarily involve the latter. But I fail to see that there is any intention at all to kill other {205} persons. Professor Sidgwick maintains that it would be thought absurd to say that, in such a case, the nihilist "did not intend" to kill them;[8] but the reason for this is simply the vagueness of language, and a confusion between a psychical fact and the moral estimate of that fact.