s of the elements, the intensities of the elements,
and, as a third, the vividness of the elements. The quality corresponds,
as we saw in the association theory, to the local position and
connection of the brain cells; the intensity corresponds to the energy
of the excitement; and the vividness, we may add now, corresponds to the
relation to motor channels. The whole mental life thus becomes the
accompaniment of a steady process of transmitting impressions and
memories into reactions. That every experience involves millions of such
elements we saw when we spoke of the description of mental life. The
effort to explain mental life shows us now that this millionfold
manifoldness belongs to a system of reactions of which all parts are in
steady correlation: a moving equilibrium of unlimited complexity. Surely
no one can reduce this wonderful manifoldness to those clumsy concepts
with which popular psychology is reporting the story of the mind and its
relations to the brain.

It may seem that such a psychological view of inner life annihilates
that which we feel as the most essential characteristic of our inner
experience, its unity and its freedom. In one sense that is certainly
true. In the real life which we live and fight through, where our duties
and our happiness lie, we know a unity and freedom of our personality
which psychology must destroy. Of course that does not mean that
psychology denies the truth of that freedom and unity. Moreover it would
condemn itself if it were to deny that which gives meaning to the
endeavors of our life and thus also to every search for truth.
Psychology claims only that we must abstract from it, when we take the
psychological standpoint towards life. Freedom of our real life means
that we must know ourselves in the midst of our life work as guided by
aims and obligations, and that in this purposive existence of ourselves
we do not feel ourselves as determined by causes. I will the fulfillment
of my ideals only because I will them. That this will itself may be the
effect of foregoing causes is an aspect which does not belong to my
naive experience. Our freedom means that in our real life our will is
not related to causes, that the point of view of causality is thus
meaningless for the value of our achievements. And the other man's will
too comes in question for us as something to be interpreted and to be
appreciated, but not to be explained by connection with causes. As long
as we move