k for it proceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained,
or produce a result. But the practical need is only the first occasion
for our reflection on the conditions of true knowledge; and even were
there no such need, motives would still be present for carrying us
beyond the stage of mere association. For not with an equal interest,
or rather with an equal lack of interest, does man contemplate those
natural processes in which a thing is linked with its former mate, and
those in which it is linked to something else. _The former processes
harmonize with the conditions of his own thinking_: the latter do not.
In the former, his _concepts_, _general judgments_, and _inferences_
apply to reality: in the latter, they have no such application. And
thus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him without
reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized
throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities,
uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and
guiding principle of his own thought." (Sigwart, Logik, bd. 3, s. 382.)

[4] Speaking technically, it is a word with a positive denotation, but
a connotation that is negative. Other things must be silent about
_what_ it is: it alone can decide that point at the moment in which it
reveals itself.

[5] A favorite argument against free-will is that if it be true, a
man's murderer may as probably be his best friend as his worst enemy, a
mother be as likely to strangle as to suckle her first-born, and all of
us be as ready to jump from fourth-story windows as to go out of front
doors, etc. Users of this argument should properly be excluded from
debate till they learn what the real question is. 'Free-will' does not
say that everything that is physically conceivable is also morally
possible. It merely says that of alternatives that really _tempt_ our
will more than one is really possible. Of course, the alternatives
that do thus tempt our will are vastly fewer than the physical
possibilities we can coldly fancy. Persons really tempted often do
murder their best friends, mothers do strangle their first-born, people
do jump out of fourth-story windows, etc.

[6] To a reader who says he is satisfied with a pessimism, and has no
objection to thinking the whole bad, I have no more to say: he makes
fewer demands on the world than I, who, making them, wish to look a
little further before I give up a