[Sidenote: Life the fixation of interests.]

Life begins to have some value and continuity so soon as there is
something definite that lives and something definite to live for. The
primacy of will, as Fichte and Schopenhauer conceived it, is a mythical
way of designating this situation. Of course a will can have no being in
the absence of realities or ideas marking its direction and contrasting
the eventualities it seeks with those it flies from; and tendency, no
less than movement, needs an organised medium to make it possible, while
aspiration and fear involve an ideal world. Yet a principle of choice is
not deducible from mere ideas, and no interest is involved in the formal
relations of things. All survey needs an arbitrary starting-point; all
valuation rests on an irrational bias. The absolute flux cannot be
physically arrested; but what arrests it ideally is the fixing of some
point in it from which it can be measured and illumined. Otherwise it
could show no form and maintain no preference; it would be impossible to
approach or recede from a represented state, and to suffer or to exert
will in view of events. The irrational fate that lodges the
transcendental self in this or that body, inspires it with definite
passions, and subjects it to particular buffets from the outer
world--this is the prime condition of all observation and inference, of
all failure or success.

[Sidenote: Primary dualities.]

Those sensations in which a transition is contained need only analysis
to yield two ideal and related terms--two points in space or two
characters in feeling. Hot and cold, here and there, good and bad, now
and then, are dyads that spring into being when the flux accentuates