The vocabulary of philosophy, mental, moral, and metaphysical : with quotations and references for the use of students / by William Fleming ; edited by Henry Calderwood.
- Date:
- 1876
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The vocabulary of philosophy, mental, moral, and metaphysical : with quotations and references for the use of students / by William Fleming ; edited by Henry Calderwood. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![WILL— appropriately designate as the purely practical faculty ox man.”—Feuchtersleben, Dietetics of the Soul. “ Appetite is the will’s solicitor, and the will is appetite’s controller ; what we covet according to the one, by the other we often reject.”—Hooker, Eccles. Pol., bk. i. On the difference between desiring and willing, see Locke Essay on Hum. Understand., bk. ii. ch. 21 ; Eeid, Act. Pow., essay ii. ch. 2 ; Stewart, Act. and Mor. Pow., App. p. 471. By some philosophers this difference has been overlooked, and they have completely identified desire and volition. [Descartes, Principles, xxxii.] “ What is desire,” says Dr. Priestly (Philosoph. Necess., p. 35), “ besides a wish to obtain some apprehended good ? And is not every wish a volition ? Every volition is nothing more than a desire, viz., a desire to accomplish some end, which end may be considered as the object of the passion or affec- tion.” ‘•'Volition,” says Mr. Belsham, “is a modification of the passion of desire.” Mr. James Mill, in his Analysis of the Hum. Mind, holds that the will is nothing but the desire that is most powerful at the' time. Dr. Thomas Brown, in his Lectures on Mor. Philosophy, has not spoken of the faculty of will or of acts of volition as separate from our desires. And in his Essay on Cause and Effect, sec. 3, he has said, “ Those brief feelings which the body immediately obeys are com- monly termed volitions, while the more lasting wishes are simply denominated desires.” The view opposed to this is strongly asserted in the follow- ing passage:—“We regard it as of great moment that the will should be looked on as a distinct power or energy of the mind. Not that we mean to represent it as exercised apart from all other faculties ; on the contrary, it blends itself with every other power. It associates itself with our intellectual decisions on the one hand, and our emotional attachments on the other, but contains an important element which cannot be resolved into either the one or the other, or into both com- bined. The other powers, such as the sensibility, the reason, the conscience, may influence the will, but they cannot con- stitute it, nor yield its peculiar workings. We have only by consciousness to look into our souls, as the will is working, to](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2199531x_0535.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
