in this sphere of purposive interest, we are free and deal
with free selves; but if in the midst of these free aims, the will
arises to consider the actions of others and of ourselves from the
standpoint of causality, then we have ourselves decided to enter a new
sphere in which it would be meaningless to seek for any will which is
not determined by causes. As soon as we have chosen the psychological
standpoint and are in the midst of the work of causal reconstruction,
any will which is not understood as determined by causes is simply an
unsolved problem. In the midst of a causal construction, absence of
causes would never mean real freedom.

In that purposive world of immediate life experience, we also are
unities inasmuch as we ourselves know us as the same in every new will
of ours. We remain identical with ourselves because every purpose is
posited in the midst of, and bound up with, the general purpose of
ourselves. And in this internal unity of meaning, nothing breaks
ourselves into pieces, and the whole manifold of experience is thus
expressed by a personality which knows itself in its purposive unity.
But this unity again is denied by our own intention as soon as we decide
to take the causal view of inner life. The purposive unity must now
transform itself into an endless complexity, and our own self becomes a
composite of hundreds of thousands of elements.

On the other hand, all this does not mean that psychology cannot have
its own consistent conception of the mind's unity and freedom. Our
psychological mind is a unity because its manifold is a system in which
all parts hang together. A change in any one part involves changes in
the whole system. The interrelation, to be sure, is not a strictly
psychical one, for we have seen that the causal connection as such
appears at the physical side. But, inasmuch as there is no psychical
process which does not belong to a physiological one, the
interconnection of the mental facts is complete and involves the
totality of neural processes of which after all a small part only has
its psychological record. We might compare those hundreds of millions of
neurons in each brain with the hundreds of millions of individuals who
make up the population of the nations, and the psychical accompaniment
we might compare with the written historical record of mankind. The
written records themselves have no direct interconnection, they are only
accompaniments of what happens in these mi