My will to-day may have the same aim
as my will of yesterday, but as psychical object, my will to-day is a
new will, is a new creation in every pulse beat of my life. I must will
it again, I cannot store it up. And my joy of to-day can never be as
psychical fact the same joy which I may have to-morrow. Mental objects
as such, as psychological material, are not destined to last. It has no
meaning whatever to think of their being kept over until another time.
It is a coarse materialism to conceive the mental contents like pebbles
which may remain on the road from one day to another. Our ideas and
feelings are mental appearances which have their existence in the act of
the one experience; each new experience must be an entirely new
creation.

If I remember my last year's perception, I do not dig it out from an
under-mind, in which it was stored up and buried, but I create an
entirely new memory picture, just as I may make to-day a speech which
says the same thing which I said last year, and yet my action of
speaking is not last year's speech movement. It is a new action, and the
movement did not lie over somewhere during the interval. Mental life is
produced anew in every moment. When the first experience is gone and the
second comes, nothing of the stuff from which the first was made still
has existence in the content of consciousness. By this fact it becomes
entirely impossible ever to conceive necessary connections in the sense
of physical necessity in the world of consciousness. The one idea may
bring to me another idea by association, but as long as I consider both
strictly as mental facts, I can never understand why this association
happens, I can never grasp the real mechanism of the connection, I can
never see necessity between the disappearance of the one and the
appearance of the other. It remains a mystery which does not justify any
expectation that the same sequence will result again. Whatever belongs
to the psychical world can never be linked by a real insight into
necessity. Causality there remains an empty name without promise of a
real explanation.

Only when we have recognized this fundamental difficulty in the efforts
for psychological explanation, can we understand the way which modern
psychology has taken most successfully. The end of this way is simply
this: every psychical fact is to be thought of as an accompaniment of a
physical process and the necessary connections of these physical
processes det