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Now consider a case in which we do take up an observant attitude
towards a voluntary action, I mean the very instructive case of
trying to draw a square with its diagonals by placing a mirror on
your drawing paper and directing your hand by what you see by looking at
it in the mirror.
And here one is inclined to say that our real actions, the
ones to which volition immediately applies //
for which volition is immediately responsible // ,
are not the movements of our hand but something further back, say, the
actions of our muscles.
We are inclined to compare the case with this:
Imagine we had a series of levers before us, through which, by a
hidden mechanism, we could direct a pencil drawing on a sheet of
paper.
We might then be in doubt which levers to pull in order to get the
desired movement of the pencil; and we could say that we
deliberately pulled this particular lever, although we
didn't deliberately produce the wrong result that we
thereby produced.
But this comparison, though it easily suggests itself, is very
misleading.
For in the case of the levers which we saw before us, there was
such a thing as deciding which one we were going to pull before pulling
it.
But does our volition, as it were, play on a keyboard of muscles,
choosing which one it was going to use next? ‒ ‒
For some actions which we call deliberate it is characteristic that we,
in some sense, “know what we are going to do” before we
do it.
In this sense we say that we know what object we are going to point to,
and what we might call “the act of knowing” might
consist in looking at the object before we point to it or in describing
its position by words or
120.
pictures.
Now we could describe our drawing the square through the mirror by
saying that our acts were deliberate as far as their motor aspect is
concerned but not as far as their visual aspect is concerned.
This
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