Philosophy as Thinking the World According to the Principle of Least Effort

a purposefully functioning organization not only solve a task incumbent upon it at all, but it must also accomplish its solution with the relatively smallest amount of force or the relatively fewest means possible under the given circumstances. A given solution will be considered to have been executed more purposefully the less force was uselessly wasted during its execution; conversely, more force will be considered applied more purposefully the greater the achievement attained through it.

3. While we completely disregard the extent to which the soul, through its uniform action on the body directed by reflection, represents a highly purposeful and force-saving principle for the latter as an organism both capable of and in need of movement, we want to examine here only its theoretical function, thinking, to see whether a striving for the saving of force can be demonstrated therein.

The first question that arises in this consideration, namely: what is to be understood in the theoretical function of the soul by a given task and the corresponding force-means, will be sufficiently answered for our purpose if we replace the general expression with the narrower, scientific one: apperceive.¹⁾

4. In theoretical apperception, to which we must therefore turn our attention, two masses of ideas enter into mutual interpenetration for the purpose of a substantive determination, or characterization, of that mass which has entered into the process as the relatively more indeterminate one. That mass of ideas which provides the substantive determination is called the apperceiving one; the one to be determined is also the one to be apperceived. Thus, for example, in an apperception presented by Steinthal,²⁾ in which the unknown phenomenon of a zoophyte animal-plant, like a coral or sea anemone is subsumed under the concept of "animal," the perceptual idea of the