This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 edition. Excerpt: …Appetitus with the consciousness of it. It is a striving through a body which is necessarily the object of a Mind, and through a Mind which cannot 41 but know the affections of the body. And as the highest virtue in man is to know,
the conatus which constitutes him must be at least 42 an effort to understand, or a mental activity. We may agree in the main with this interpretation and still insist that in so far as we can isolate desire in thought from the endeavor it bears witness to, it is impotent. This is not to say that we can characterize it as an epi'phenomenon. We must not think of awareness as separate from the impulse it reflects, as a spectator powerless to influence events. But if we say with Duff that the Conatus
is a striving through a body which is necessarily the object of a Mind, we are likely to make a similar separation, and go to the opposite extreme of conceiving the Mind as an entity, as a power consciousness somehow distinct from the Conatus, with to originate 43 ideas and which directs the Conatue according to its own ends-the attainment of knowledge, and of virtue. There seems to be no apparent escape from the conclusion that conscious though it be, the Conatuo 44 is essentially a blind striving. A blind striving, that is, when we contrast it with the creative activity of a genuinely self-directive agent. And this mechanical automatism of the Cpnutus holds true whether the desire be an awareness of a passion or of an active emotion. Take first passion. As we know, passion results from man’s relation to his environment, and be the effects pleasant or unpleasant its causes lie without An infant believes thatAits freely own free will it desires milk, an angry child believes that it…