ANY one who has been called upon, in the course of a busy life, to induce people to work with him or at least to keep from hindering the task in hand, must have had daily occasion for observing—to his immense irritation, sorrow, or disgust—individuals who seem to suffer from a more or less complete paralysis of will.

Such experiences are so frequent in the ordinary executive’s life that he ends by building up a museum of psychological types inside his mind, grouping his past tormentors according to their similarities or variations, and recognising new ones at a glance—marking them with appropriate labels in order to govern his attitude toward them accordingly.

Here, for instance, is the ‘Visionary,” the “day-dreamer”—the individual who is always having big ideas. He impresses us with his glowing exposition of the first one; but we soon find there is nothing in it. He comes back with a second, and again we listen to him, hopefully. Finally after repeated disappointments we set him down in our minds as a person who is never to be taken seriously.

This man is a man whose brain is fertile in plans, schemes, intentions; but when he has made those plans, elaborated those schemes, announced those intentions, talking of them as though they were imminent realities, he suddenly forgets all about them; or, indeed, if he does go so far as to attempt to carry them out, he shortly finds that they are not so glorious as he had thought, loses interest in them, throws them aside, to come back with another set of plans, schemes, and intentions, which he puts forward with the same results. If we, for our part, soon lose faith in this person, he never loses faith in himself; so over-bubbling, so irrepressible, so uncontrollable is this faculty he has for conceiving grand conceptions and dreaming great dreams.

Here again is another sort of person—the timid, over-cautious individual, the man who is never sure of himself, the man who never gets anything done; because, when he sets out to do a piece of work, he finds his mind obsessed with all the possible consequences of the steps he is about to take, tries to guard against them all; and, since such possibilities are infinite in number, shifts uneasily from fear to fear, till he ends by never starting.

Or still again we meet the “broken spirit,” the “discouraged man,” the person who seems bound to a past that will never return, who cannot adapt himself to the present, and is ever helpless and inactive before the problem of the moment.

One could think of numberless other “types”; but these three will be sufficient for our purposes. What is the matter with such people? The first, we might say, lacks “executive ability,” practical insight into things—in the language of the philosopher, concreteness; the second lacks courage, determination, initiative; the third lacks enthusiasm, buoyancy, healthy interest in life.

What I am going to say, however, is that they are all three deficient in the same thing: they are all deficient in will—in the will that means concreteness, means courage, means interest in life. And what, we may further ask, do they have to compensate for their deficiency? They have nothing—or to use philosophical terms again, they have Non-being itself; and that is the terrible thing about their anguish, as well as the reason for it.

To be sure, their minds are working vigorously: each and all they are painting mental pictures after the fashion of a poet, and reflecting, reasoning, thinking, after the fashion of a thinker. But if they have imagery aplenty—sequences, series, strings of images, that is, they never have the image which betokens what we call imagination; just as all their reflections, notions, ideas, never come to constitute what we call thought. They never feel that sense of satisfaction, that thrill of joy, which the poet or the thinker feels. For this they would need the very things they lack: the will to contemplate—the will of the artist; the will to know the truth—the will of the thinker. In some cases, indeed, individuals of this type escape perdition by saying secretly to themselves (or by acting as though they were saying to themselves) something to this effect: “What a sorry failure I am: useless, inefficient, afraid of life, hopeless, crushed, despondent!” And as they thus visualise themselves in their own minds, whether by self-analysis, by poetry, or by confession (the poetry may even be written, just as the confession may be made to some friend they trust), they experience a more or less enduring relief from their troubles; because, to the extent of the effort they make at least to understand themselves, they attain a certain degree of volition, a certain degree of spiritual activity. But if, on the other hand, they do not hit upon this remedy of self-analysis or self-contemplation, and if they fail to find expression in any kind of action, then the Nothing about them swallows them up: their restlessness of spirit leads straight to a negation of life—to perversion, madness, suicide—the death of the individual, in short.

The descriptions here outlined in just a few rapid touches are empirical, of course, and that is why, after the manner of the psychologists, I have called them “types”; but these types exemplify on a large scale (and with some distortion because the scale is large) the eternal process of willing as the latter reveals itself in what Hegel would call its antitheses. Bearing these types in mind, but coming down from abstractions to concrete reality, we are able to see that facts which here seemed to stand by themselves, separable and distinguishable from other facts, are nothing but a normal aspect of will, present in every act of volition which we perform: the aspect of fancifulness, of vague and rambling conception, of fear, hesitancy, inaction, futility—the passive phase, in other words.

This aspect of volition I have elsewhere named as the “phase of desire,” defining “desire” as “will for the impossible,” or, what amounts to the same thing, as “unrealisable will.” “Desire” is something beyond contemplation or thought; but it is not yet volition; in fact it stands, in the volitional process, as “that which cannot be willed,” or as “that which is not to be willed.” It cannot revert and become mere contemplation or thought again, because the Spirit has already covered that ground and never retraces its steps; and it does not get to be will because it does not accept the conditions of volition: it wills without willing; a contradiction which does not exist as a state in itself, but represents rather the transition from thinking to action—is, in fact, that transition.

In the moral sphere, this antithetical aspect of will, “desiring,” is well known as the conflict between a utilitarian, and therefore selfish impulse, and the ethical imperative by which the selfish impulse is superseded. But the same aspect also reappears in the utilitarian sphere itself, as the passion for something harmful and destructive which yields to the will for one’s own welfare or comfort.

Here an objection might be raised, which involves a question as to the legitimacy of speaking of a “utilitarian sphere” in the volitional process. If, we might say, the utilitarian phase of a volition is that of “pleasure,” of impulse—impulse, that is, toward some specific thing—how can any conflict arise? If I want a thing, that impulse absorbs me entirely, and encounters no obstacles either in my moral scruples (which, as we are assuming for the case, have not been aroused), or in any competing impulse (since the latter, so far as it has been rejected by my choice, does not exist).

I must point out, however, that what the utilitarian impulse meets is precisely a multitude of competing desires, a scattering, centrifugal force which leads away from volition back toward contemplation and reflection—whither we never arrive, since the contemplation we now attain is not true contemplation, nor the reflection true reflection. And this competition our impulse strives to overcome—a struggle which carries us into what I call the practical sphere of the Spirit’s activity.