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Carried into practice, Voluntarism would be as like Anarchism as two peas. None the less we must not undervalue the theoretical progress shown in the distinction quoted above. Herbert approaches within a hair's-breadth of the standpoint of Sociology, and what separates him from it is not so much the logical accentuation of the social-contract theory as the indirect assumption of it.
Force and the unconditional freedom of the individual, or Anarchy, are incompatible ideas, and therefore I am a Voluntarist, not an Anarchist a Voluntarist in all questions where Voluntarism is admissible; but I return into the State when by the nature of things some organisation is necessary." The answer is obvious: the inhabitants of Texas.
The two great characteristics of the British race initiative and endurance are due to this burning flame of voluntarism. The West India expedition was organized and all expenses guaranteed by private individuals. The capital was £60,000, and its allocation was £40,000 for expenses and £20,000 to be distributed amongst those who had volunteered to serve.
Nothing but voluntarism can enable logicians to see that our actual procedure in knowing is the reverse of this, that causal explanation is the analysis of a continuum, and that 'phenomena, 'events, 'effects, and 'causes' are all creations of our selective attention; that in selecting them we run a risk of analyzing falsely, and that if we do, our 'inductions' will be worthless.
Wundt, the German scientist, whose school of thought is called voluntarism, considers the motive-force of Energy to be something that may be called Will. Crusius, as far back as 1744 said: "Will is the dominating force of the world."
England possesses a theorist of a higher type in Auberon Herbert, who, like Bakunin and Kropotkin, is a scion of a noble house. Herbert began as a representative of Democracy in the seventies, and to-day edits in London a paper called The Free Life, in which he preaches an individualist Anarchism of his own, or, as he himself calls it, "Voluntarism."
The external distinction between Individualists and Communists is certainly marked most clearly by the condemnation of the foolish propaganda of action of the former; and in order to prevent the disagreeable confusion of their views with the perpetrators of bomb outrages, the theorists of Germany and England give their systems more harmless names, such as Free Land, Anticratism, United Christianity, Voluntarism, and so on.
Flournoy: La philosophie de William James. Trans. This particular article deals with the conception of thought as a stream of consciousness, which intellect distorts by framing into concepts. We must not be misled by parallels. Stebbing: Pragmatism and French Voluntarism. Perry: Present Philosophical Tendencies.
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