Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Alexander

Alexander is doing that very philosopher thing where the real drama is a vocabulary problem. “Conation” already signals he’s working in the early-20th-century psychological-philosophical zone where mind gets divided into knowing, feeling, and willing. The sentence isn’t there to dazzle; it’s there to slow you down. He’s flagging that the phenomenon he’s tracking has a “practical side” - something like drive, effort, purposiveness, the push of an impulse into action - but that any label you pick will smuggle in a theory you haven’t earned.

The intent is methodological: Alexander wants to name a mental function without prematurely packaging it as “will” (too moralized), “desire” (too appetite-driven), “impulse” (too mechanical), or “volition” (too tidy and conscious). His syntax performs the predicament. The line doubles back on itself, delaying the noun you expect, mirroring a mind trying to grasp an active tendency that only becomes visible in its effects. Even “designate” is telling: he’s not claiming to discover a new entity, just to mark one out cleanly.

Subtext: he’s wary of the period’s confidence that psychology can be carved up into neat faculties. If you can’t find a “satisfactory name,” maybe the phenomenon doesn’t respect your categories; maybe practice (action, habit, striving) is messier than introspection admits. In context, Alexander’s broader project (from Space, Time, and Deity through his moral psychology) aims to treat mind as emergent and continuous with nature. Naming “conation” on its practical side becomes a test of that ambition: can philosophy describe agency without turning it into either mysticism or machinery?