Thus we are 'driven on' by experience, if not to morality, at least to a more adequate knowledge of what we want, by a dialectic process whose motive power comes from the free, coöperative subconsciousness, not from the repressed subconsciousness.
VI.
By aid of this conception of an experiential dialectic of the will, we may now be able so far to bridge the initial difference in terminology between the ethics of Royce and the Holt-Freudian ethics as to show what their relations are. Let me attempt to resume these relations in a series of propositions.
(a) For Royce the moral problem of the individual might be stated as a problem of finding what on the whole one wants to do,—and then doing it; the process of this discovery is analogous rather to the dialectic of the will than to the method of discrimination.
For Royce, as for Holt, the 'soul' or self is to be defined in terms of purpose. It makes little difference in this connection whether we call the psychological materials desires, instincts, or wishes.[1] In either case, it is not by the possession of any soul-substance that I am defined a self; but it is "by this meaning of my life-plan, by this possession of an ideal."[2] And Royce's conception of the moral problem is so far opposed to any kind of heteronomy that the whole duty of any man is to be found in the fulfilling of his unique purpose.
- ↑ Compare Royce's definition of a desire (Outlines of Psychology, p. 366) with Holt's definition of wish (p. 56). For Royce, "A desire means a tendency to action, experienced as such, and at the same time felt as a relatively satisfactory tendency." Of the wish, Holt says that it is "a course of action which the living body executes or is prepared to execute with regard to some object or some fact of its environment." Both definitions raise the question what kind of existence a desire or wish may have when the course of action referred to is not carried out,—which is of course their characteristic mode of existence. If we may assume that " tendency to action" in the one case, and "prepared to execute" in the other, mean the same condition of incipient activity and physiological setting, the differences between the concepts seem to be simply (1) that Royce expressly recognizes the element of consciousness, and (2) that Holt expressly recognizes the environing objects with which the action, if it became actual, would deal. The definitions are certainly not inconsistent.
- ↑ The World and the Individual, Vol. II, p. 276. For Holt, however, the soul is a unity only when integration is accomplished: he frequently uses the plural of purpose or wish as equivalent to soul. See pp. 49, 200 f., cf. pp. 95. 118.
