Let us take them in succession
in seeking a reply.
If we assume a wider thinker, it is evident
that his purposes envelope mine. I am really
lecturing _for_ him; and although I cannot surely
know to what end, yet if I take him religiously,
I can trust it to be a good end, and willingly
connive. I can be happy in thinking that my
activity transmits his impulse, and that his
ends prolong my own. Son long as I take him
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religiously, in short, he does not de-realize my
activities. He tends rather to corroborate the
reality of them, so long as I believe both them
and him to be good.
When now we turn to ideas, the case is different,
inasmuch as ideas are supposed by the
association psychology to influence each other
only from next to next. The 'span' of an idea
or pair of ideas, is assumed to be much smaller
instead of being larger than that of my total
conscious field. The same results may get
worked out in both cases, for this address is
being given anyhow. But the ideas supposed
to 'really' work it out had no prevision of the
whole of it; and if I was lecturing for an absolute
thinker in the former case, so, by similar
reasoning, are my ideas now lecturing for me,
that is, accomplishing unwittingly a result
which I approve and adopt.
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