114 THE SCIENTIFIC PLAN OF THE CONGRESS 



seek to find what we are really submitting to if we accept the sugges- 

 tions of our social surroundings. And yet this similar demand has 

 most dissimilar consequences. We submit to an object and want to 

 find out what we are really submitting to. That cannot mean any- 

 thing else, as we have seen, than to seek the effects of the object and 

 thus to look forward to what we have to expect from the object. 

 On the other hand, if we want to find out what we are really sub- 

 mitting to if we agree with the decision of our neighbor, the only 

 meaning of the question can be to ask what our neighbor really is 

 deciding on, what is contained in his decision; and as his decision 

 must mean an agreement or disagreement with the will-act of another 

 subject, we cannot understand the suggestion which comes to us 

 without understanding in respect to what propositions of others it 

 takes a stand. Our interest is in this case thus led from those sub- 

 jects of will which enter into our immediate experience to other sub- 

 jects whose purposes stand in the relation of suggestion and demand 

 to the present ones. And if we try to develop the system of these 

 relations, we come to an endless chain of will-relations, in which one 

 individual will always points back in its decisions to another indi- 

 vidual will with which it agrees or disagrees, which it imitates or 

 overcomes by a new attitude of will; and the whole network of these 

 will-relations is the political or religious or artistic or social history 

 of mankind. This system of history as a system of teleologically 

 connected will-attitudes is elaborated from the will-propositions 

 which reach us in immediate experience, with the same necessity 

 with which the mechanical universe of natural science is worked out 

 from the objects of our immediate experience. 



The historical system of will-connections is similar to the system of 

 object-connections, not only in its starting in the immediate experi- 

 ence, but further in its also seeking identities. Without this feature 

 history would not offer to our understanding real connections. We 

 must link the will-attitudes of men by showing the identity of the 

 alternatives. Just as the physical thing is substituted by a large 

 number of atoms which remain identical in the causal changes, in 

 the same way the personality is substituted by an endless manifold- 

 ness of decisions and becomes linked with the historical community 

 by the thought that each of these partial decisions refers to an alter- 

 native which is identical with that of other persons. And yet there 

 remains a most essential difference between the historical and the 

 causal connection. In a world of things the mere identical continu- 

 ity is sufficient to determine the phenomena of any given moment. 

 In a world of will the identity of alternatives cannot determine be- 

 forehand the actual decision; that belongs to the free activity of the 

 subject. If this factor of freedom were left out, man would be made 

 an object and history a mere appendix of natural science. The 



