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

on its part to an unpurposeful waste of force.

Thus, we react with displeasure if, in a series of ideas to be developed (e.g., in a lecture, a treatise, and the like), the following ideas are not ordered according to their inner connection; for every "breaking of the thread" or "jumping" to new paths compels the apperceiver to suppress an excited group of ideas and to reproduce a new group that had hitherto remained at rest. This extra effort is unpurposeful insofar as a later stepping back must nevertheless return to the interrupted train of thought; that extra effort could therefore have been saved by a more suitable arrangement of the material, and the set goal could have been reached with fewer means.³⁾

8. Another reaction of displeasure is generated by the existence of a contradiction in our thinking. The waste of force here lies in the inevitable but futile attempts of thought to eliminate one of the contradictory ideas or to remove the contradiction by means of a third (resolving) idea. But the need to resolve a contradiction again proves only the striving for the saving of force; for here, two different ideas, which require different masses of ideas for their apperception, are always to be reduced to one.

9. Finally, let a case be mentioned in which the feeling of displeasure associated with the expenditure of force can, under certain circumstances, act even more intensely than a possible, objectively justified, strong heartache. This happens when we prefer a sad certainty to "wearing" uncertainty in anticipation of unhappy news. In such states of uncertainty, an idea (that of the expected news) wanders, as it were, between two opposing apperceptions—an affirmative and a negative one—