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If we ask the psychological construction of this myth, and the ever present conditions of man’s life which have rendered him always ready to create it and loath to renounce it, we trace the former distinctly to his sense of the purposive nature of the laws of thought, and the latter to the wide difference between desire and fulfilment.
How do economic movements influence the mind of the community? How far do non-economic factors produce effects on the psychical mechanism of the economic agents? But it would be idle to claim to-day for exact psychology, with its methods of causal thought, regions in which so far popular psychology, with its methods of purposive thought, is still sovereign.
If each one of the small steps is purposive the result is purposive, though there was never purpose extended over more than one, two, or perhaps at most three steps at a time.
If my neighbor is to me a subject, for instance, in the midst of an ordinary conversation, he comes in question only with reference to his aims and meanings: whatever he utters has a purpose and end. I understand his inner life by taking a purposive point of view.
Each of these spheres of the mind has its voluntary and automatic phases, a fact which is usually lost sight of, inasmuch as the automatism of the mind is frequently confounded with the subconscious. All purposive action tends to become automatic, whether it be physical or mental, sensory or psychic.
But such a conclusion is not only contrary to M. Bergson's philosophy, but to daily observation and scientific knowledge; for we know that life is directive, purposive, and progressive, and if evolution teaches us anything, it tells us that it must have been so always. We are thus driven into this dilemma: life must be an energy but, as such, it cannot be purposive!
The psychologist, like the naturalist, aims towards explanation, and it is this demand which forces him to look from the psychical facts to the physical ones, from the mind to the brain. He is under an illusion if he fancies that he can explain mental facts by themselves. The purposive mind has its connection in itself, the causal psychological mind demands for its connection the body.
And on page 234, Vol. II: "Hence it is that, in accordance with the received teleological view, it has been customary to admire the so-called 'wisdom of the Creator' and the 'purposive contrivances of His Creation' especially in this matter.
The second is the possibility that out of the wreckage and rubble of an outmoded cultural pattern, a mature, chastened, more experienced, more consciously purposive generation will arise, possessing the wit to see the necessity of creative advance, and the wisdom to guide the pioneers of humanity along the difficult and dangerous path that they must follow if they are to reach the land of purpose and promise.
But an ideal purpose which has no roots in the deep sea of passionate sex is a greater disaster still. And now we have only these two things: sex as a fatal goal, which is the essential theme of modern tragedy: or ideal purpose as a deadly parasite. Sex passion as a goal in itself always leads to tragedy. There must be the great purposive inspiration always present.
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