THE FOUR THEORETICAL DIVISIONS 105 



cannot be a purpose where there is not a will. If we come from pure 

 experience to knowledge by a purposive transformation, we must 

 acknowledge the reality of will in ourselves, or rather, we must find 

 ourselves as will in the midst of pure experience before we reach any 

 knowledge. And so it is indeed. We can abstract from all those recon- 

 structions which the sciences suggest to us and go back to the most 

 immediate naive experience; but we can never reach an experience 

 which does not contain the doubleness of subject and object, of will 

 and world. That doubleness has nothing whatever to do with the 

 difference of physical and psychical; both the physical thing and the 

 psychical idea are objects. The antithesis is not that between two 

 kinds of objects, since we have seen that in the immediate experience 

 the objects are not at all split up into the two groups of material and 

 mental things; it is rather the antithesis between the object in its 

 undiffercntiated state on the one side and the subject in its will-atti- 

 tude on the other side. Yes, even if we speak of the subject which 

 stands as a unity behind the will-attitudes, we are already reconstruct- 

 ing the real experience in the interest of the purposes of knowledge. 

 In the immediate experience, we have the will-attitudes themselves, 

 and not a subject which wills them. 



If we ask ourselves finally what is then the ultimate difference 

 between those two elements of our pure experience, between the object 

 and the will-attitude, we stand before the ultimate data : we call that 

 element which exists merely through a reference to its opposite, the 

 object, and we call that element of our experience which is complete 

 in itself, the attitude of the will. If we experienced liking or dislik- 

 ing, affirming or denying, approving or disapproving in the same way 

 in which we experience the red and the green, the sweet and the sour, 

 the rock and the tree and the moon, we should know objects only. 

 But we do experience them in quite a different way. The rock and 

 the tree do not point to anything else, but the approval has no real- 

 ity if it does not point to its opposition in disapproval, and the denial 

 has no meaning if it is not meant in relation to the affirmative. This 

 doubleness of our primary experience, this having of objects and of 

 antagonistic attitudes must be acknowledged wherever we speak of ex- 

 perience at all. We know no object without attitude, and no attitude 

 without object. The two are one state; object and attitude form 

 a unity which we resolve by the different way in which we experience 

 these two features of the one state: we find the object and we live 

 through the attitude. It is a different kind of awareness, the having 

 of the object and the taking of the attitude. In real life our will is 

 never an object which we simply perceive. The psychologist may treat 

 the will as such, but in the immediate experience of real life, we are 

 certain of our action by doing it and not by perceiving our doing; and 

 this our performing and rejecting is really our self which we posit as 



