THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
short-hand term for a series of ideas; and will an abstract term for a
series of actions or volitions: "the intellect and the will are related to
this or that idea or volition as rockiness to this or that rock." 61
Finally,
62
"will and intellect are one and the same thing; for a volition is merel)
an idea which, by richness of associations (or perhaps through the ab-
sence of competitive ideas) , has remained long enough in consciousness to-
pass over into action. Every idea becomes an action unless stopped in the
transition by a different idea; the idea is itself the first stage of a unified
organic process of which external action is the completion.
What is often called will, as the impulsive force which determines the
duration of an idea in consciousness, should be called desire, which "is
the very essence of man." 63 Desire is an appetite or instinct of which we
are conscious; but instincts need not always operate through conscious
desire. 64 Behind the instincts is the vague and varied effort for self-
preservation (conatus sese preservandi)
and even infra-human activity, just as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were
to see the will to live or the will to power everywhere. Philosophers seldom
disagree.
; Spinoza sees this in all human
"Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own
being; and the endeavor wherewith a thing seeks to persist in its own
being is nothing else than the actual essence of that thing"; 65 the power
whereby a thing persists is the core and essence of its being. Every instinct
is a device developed by nature to preserve the individual (or, as our
solitary bachelor fails to add, the species or the group.) Pleasure and pain
are the satisfaction or the hindrance of an instinct; they are not the causes
of our desires, but their results; we do not desire things because they give
us pleasure; but they give us pleasure because we desire them; 66 and we
desire them because we must.
There is, consequently, no free will; the necessities of survival determine
instinct, instinct determines desire, and desire determines thought and
action. "The decisions of the mind are nothing save desires, which vary
according to various dispositions." 67 "There is in the mind no absolute
or free will; but the mind is determined in willing this or that by a cause
which is determined in its turn by another cause, and this by another, and
so on to infinity." 68 "Men think themselves free because they are con-
scious of their volitions and desires, but are ignorant of the causes by
which they are led to wish and desire." 69
Spinoza compares the feeling
of free will to a stone's thinking, as it travels through space, that it determines
its own trajectory and selects the place and time of its fall. 70
II, 48, note. "II, 49, corollary. IV, 18.
**Spinoza is alive to the power of the "unconscious," as seen in somnambulism.
(II, 2, note) ; and notes the phenomena of double personality (IV, 39, note).
Ill, 6, 7. "HI, 57. m, 2, note.
II, 48. % App. ^Epistle 58, ed. Pollock.