350 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



the impulse towards it is rightly characterised as Desire. 

 Facts also compel us to admit a conflict of desires in that 

 stage. What then is there in Will beyond the victory of 

 one desire over another ? The true answer to this ques- 

 tion, which is of considerable interest in view of the 

 above discussions, seems to be given by those thinkers 

 who identify the will with the total or resultant 

 influence of character as a whole, while desire rests upon 

 some single and separate impulse. The will is not to be 

 regarded as an additional impulse, or as a force existing 

 outside impulses and operating upon them. It is rather 

 the system or synthesis of impulses, the broad practical 

 bent and tendency of one's nature. Now here as else- 

 where the development as we pass from a lower to a 

 higher stage consists primarily in a growing explicitness. 

 It is quite possible that even in animal life, when there is 

 a conflict of desires, that one tends to prevail which is 

 most intimately bound up with the animal's whole mode 

 of life. And at least among the domestic animals, we see 

 symptoms of shame and remorse when under the stress of 

 momentary excitement such an impulse is violated and 

 remorse is precisely the tingling with which the permanent 

 character, the real self, comes to life again. The new 

 development is merely that those broad tendencies of the 

 character which before operated, if at all, obscurely and 

 unconsciously, have now a definite conception to guide 

 them. The nature of the self, its character, its duties, the 

 wider life of which it is a part, now become conceptions, 

 ideals, or principles which appeal to the personality as 

 a whole, just as particular satisfactions appeal to special 

 impulses. Just as the special impulse when it formulates 

 its end into an idea becomes Desire, so what we have called 

 the broad impulses of the personality when their end is 

 defined by conception constitute Will. The will, with its 

 broad, permanent ends, presents itself as overriding and 

 independent of impulse, and out of this appearance the 

 fiction of the motiveless Will has very naturally grown 

 up. We are aware of the Will often not as desire, but 

 as constraint overcoming Desire, and when Will and 

 Desire coalesce there is still something added to desire 



