sider in our real experience the object alone. We saw clearly that we, as acting personalities, in our will and in our attitudes, do not feel ourselves in relation to object
hich, as we saw, characterizes all will-activity. The rock or the tree in our surroundings may stimulate our reactions, but does not claim to be in itself a decision with an alternative. But the political or legal or artistic or social or religious will of my neighbors not only demands my agreement or disagreement, but presents itself to me in its own meaning as a free decision which rejects the opposite, and its whole meaning is destroyed if I consider it like the tree or the rock as a mere phenomenon, as
, if we want to find out what we are really submitting to if we agree with the decision of our neighbor, the only meaning of the question can be to ask what our neighbor really is deciding on, what is contained in his decision; and as his decision must mean an agreement or disagreement with the will-act of another subject, we cannot understand the suggestion which comes to us without understanding in respect to what propositions of others it takes a stand. Our interest is in this case thus led from those subjects of will which enter into our immediate experience to other subjects whose purposes stand in the relation of suggestion and demand to the present ones. And if we try to
of decisions and becomes linked with the historical community by the thought that each of these partial decisions refers to an alternative which is identical with that of other persons. And yet there remains a most essential difference between the historical and the causal connection. In a world of things the mere identical continuity is sufficient to determine the phenomena of any given moment. In a world of will the identity of alternatives cannot determine beforehand the actual decision; that belongs to the free activity of the subject.
sion binds every possible individual who performs this act if he is to share our common world of will and meaning. Such an over-individual connection of will-acts is what we call the logical connection. It shares with all other connections the dependence upon the category of identity. The logical connection shows how far one act or combination of acts involves, and thus is partially identical with, a new combination. This logical connection has,
l those propositions which are presuppositions of our common reality, independent of the free individual decision. Here belong the acts of approval-the ethical approval of changes and achievements, as well as the ?sthetic approval of the given world; the acts of conviction-the religious convictions of a superstructure of the world as well as the metaphysical convictions of a substructure; and above all, the acts of affirmation and submission, the logical as well as the mathematical. But to be consistent we must really demand that merely the over-individual logical connections are treated in this division. If we deal, for instance, with the ?sthetical or ethical acts as psychological experiences, or as historical propositions, they belong to
d appear more logical to change their order and to begin with that division whose material is those over-individual will-acts on which all possible knowledge must depend, and then to turn to those individual will-acts which determine the formulation of our present-day knowledge, and then only to go to the objects of knowledge, the over-individual and the individual ones. In short, we must begin with the normative sciences,