Impulsion, Mind, Will

According to Dewey, a human possesses a plastic power to set itself in motion, which he calls 'Impulsion'. For Formaterialism, Impulsion is a manifestation of its Material Principle, but with two significant divergences from some traditional interpretations. First, Formaterialism disagrees with Dewey, and others, that, even as spontaneous, Impulsion functions only in response to circumstantial exigency, because, as has been discussed, the Material Principle is one of the two complementary, but independent, factors of human Experience. Second, it contests any characterization of Impulsion as non-mental. That it is non-mental is generally inferred from either of two observations--that it eventuates in physical processes, and that it is radically unlike phenomena that are uncontroversially classified as mental, e. g. cognitive representations. However, both inferences presuppose what Formaterialism rejects--the premise of a more fundamental Mind-Body split. As has been previously discussed, Formaterialism holds, to the contrary, that the Mind-Body split is an abstraction from two more unitary fundamental processes, each of which has both a mental and a physical pole--mind-becoming-body, e. g. locomotility, and body-becoming-mind, e. g. empirical cognition. So, in the absence of that standard presupposition, that Impulsion ends physically is no argument against it originating mentally, and that its origin is unlike cognitive mental components is no argument against its being mental in a respect different than them. In other words, Impulsion is Will in its unreflective mode.