The Idea of Freedom 139taken up into thinking, and thereafter shares in thinking’s
spiritual being.)
“I-consciousness” is based on the human organization,
from which our acts of will flow. Following the preceding
discussion, insight into the connection between thinking,
the conscious I, and acts of will can be achieved only if
we first observe how an act of will proceeds from the hu-
man organization.^2
For an individual act of will, we must consider both the
motive and the motive power. The motive is a conceptual
or mentally pictured factor; the motive power is the factor
of willing that is conditioned directly within the human or-
ganization. The conceptual factor, or motive, is the mo-
mentary determining principle of willing; the motive
power is the abiding determining principle of the individ-
ual. A motive can be a pure concept or a concept with a
specific relation to perceiving, that is, a mental picture. By
affecting a human individual and by determining that indi-
vidual to act in a certain direction, general and individual-
ized concepts (mental pictures) become motives of
willing. Yet one and the same concept, or one and the
same mental picture, has different effects on different in-
dividuals. The same concept (or mental picture) can cause
different people to perform different acts. Willing, then, is
not merely the result of the concept or mental picture, but
also of the individual human make-up. We shall call this
individual make-up, following Eduard von Hartmann, the
- From p.132 through the above, passages were added, or reworked,
for the new edition of 1918. (Author’s note)