Nineteenth-Century Science and Religion iji 



(the Finite Ego of Fichte). Action consists in the passage from 

 the voluntas volens to the voluntas voluta, in the movement of 

 man towards everything the possession of which helps to increase 

 the dominion of his own will, towards everything which he needs 

 to translate into action his infinite potentiality. 



The voluntas voluta, which is realised in consciousness, never 

 succeeds in exhausting the voluntas volens, so long as we remain in 

 the sphere of phenomena, and it is this inadequacy which drives 

 the Ego continually to fresh actions. Now Blondel's method 

 exists in demonstrating that the will, if it wishes to arrive at its 

 full possession and to exhaust its infinite potentiality, must accept 

 the revelation of the supernatural. Only thus can the voluntas 

 valuta be adequate for the voluntas volens ; and Blondel makes 

 us pass, in fact, through the various phases of action in the world of 

 phenomena, and makes us see from each how the voluntas volens 

 cannot be satisfied and how there is therefore a need to go further. 

 One of these stages is, for example, science, which makes the 

 forces of the physical world enter into the plane of our conscious 

 will, and makes them co-operate with us ; but it is not sufficient, 

 because outside each individual there are other men who limit its 

 truth. In order to bring about co-operation in the development 

 of their own existence, the various forms of human society have 

 been constituted. But the Ego does not find complete satisfac- 

 tion even in society, and from this follows the construction of the 

 ethical ideal which transcends phenomena. Even this does not 

 satisfy the voluntas volens, which needs something actual and real. 

 Man therefore makes a supreme effort to fill with his own energies 

 alone the abyss which separates .the will from that which he wishes 

 to be, and he makes in his own image and likeness a God in whom 

 his supreme ideal may be concentrated. We thus have natural or 

 superstitious religion. Even this does not satisfy the will, because 

 the inexhaustible and infinite ideal cannot be adequately met by 

 representations and limited concepts. There always remains 

 therefore the need for a completion, which man cannot realise by 

 his own efforts alone. The voluntas volens is not yet entirely 

 exhausted by the voluntas valuta. Evil, suffering, and death 

 present themselves to us as a yoke which we carry and which we 

 must endure, while our profound ambition was to make everything 

 enter into the sphere of our dominion and to include the entire 

 universe in our Ego. So long as we have an external limit, so long 



