106 THE SCIENTIFIC PLAN OF THE CONGRESS 



absolute reality, not by knowing it, but by willing it. This corner- 

 stone of the Fichtean philosophy was forgotten throughout the un- 

 critical and unphilosophical decades of a mere naturalistic age. But 

 our time has finally come to give attention to it again. 



Our pure experience thus contains will-attitudes and objects of will, 

 and the different attitudes of the will give the fundamental classes of 

 human activity. We can easily recognize four different types of will- 

 relation towards the world. Our will submits itself to the world ; our 

 will approves the world as it is; our will approves the changes in the 

 world; our will transcends the world. Yet we must make at once one 

 more most important discrimination. We have up to this point sim- 

 plified our pure experience too much. It is not true that we experience 

 only objects and our own will-attitudes. Our will reaches out not only 

 to objects, but also to other subjects. In our most immediate experi- 

 ence, not reshaped at all by theoretical science, our will is in agree- 

 ment or disagreement with other wills; tries to influence them, and 

 receives influences and suggestions from them. The pseudo-philo- 

 sophy of naturalism must say of course that the will does not stand in 

 any direct relation to another will, but that the other persons are for 

 us simply material objects which we perceive, like other objects, and 

 into which we project mental phenomena like those which we find in 

 ourselves by the mere conclusion of analogy. But the complex recon- 

 structions of physiological psychology are therein substituted for the 

 primary experience. If we have to express the agreement or disagree- 

 ment of wills in the terms of causal science, we may indeed be obliged 

 to transform the real experience into such artificial constructions; 

 but in our immediate consciousness, and thus at the starting-point of 

 our theory of knowledge, we have certainly to acknowledge that we 

 understand the other person, accept or do not accept his suggestion, 

 agree or disagree with him, before we know anything of a difference 

 between physical and mental objects. 



We cannot agree with an object. We agree directly with a will, 

 which does not come to us as a foreign phenomenon, but as a proposi- 

 tion which we accept or decline. In our immediate experience will 

 thus reaches will, and we are aware of the difference between our will- 

 attitude as merely individual and our will-attitude as act of agree- 

 ment with the will-attitude of other individuals. We can go still 

 further. The circle of other individuals whose will we express in our 

 own will-act may be narrow or wide, may be our friends or the nation, 

 and this relation clearly constitutes the historical significance of our 

 attitude. In the one case our act is a merely personal choice for 

 personal purposes without any general meaning; in the other case it 

 is the expression of general tendencies and historical movements. Yet 

 our will-decisions can have connections still wider than those with our 

 social community or our nation, or even with all living men of to-day. 



