11) Substance and the Will
There are two questions which have been bound so tightly for all of history that it is hard to consider one without the other quickly populating our thoughts. In regard to our mental evolution, we cannot say with any certainty whether our faculty to deduce purpose of action developed before or following the faculty to deduce meaning of existence. Today, we are hard pressed to imagine consciousness without the faculty to deduce even simple events to the laws of causality. It is possible that in our pre-history the recognition of cause-and-effect was the foundation on which consciousness itself was built; that is to say, purpose of action cultivated a mental environment for interpreting meaning of existence. We can imagine that we first ate with our hands, walked on our feet and saw with our eyes, and only after naming the facilitators of these actions, deduced that our hands existed to eat, our feet to walk, and our eyes to see.
What we should expect is that our understanding of purpose of action and meaning of existence developed relative to each other. We can even imagine a primitive cultural landscape which hosted a subtle war in which these reductions battled for primacy over one another. However, what we can say with the greatest confidence is that once our narrative crystallized into our present understanding of history, we find only one dominate reduction: throughout history, purpose of action was subordinated to meaning of existence. Thus, it was will that became the expression of purpose of action in regard to a substance.
