I am reading a book by Kitaro Nishida, a Zen-tinged Japanese philosopher who was prominent a century ago. An Inquiry into the Good. That title reminds me a bit of Spinoza calling his masterwork Ethics. Spinoza had ethical points to make, but wanted to ground that in comprehensive premises about the world and our place in it. Nishida likewise has a (quite Zen) conception of the good to convey, but wants to start at the beginning. The beginning is a very Jamesian place, as Nishida acknowledged. His beginning is the fuzzy boundary between cognitive psychology and epistemology. "As psychologists say, we can will a movement simply by recollecting a past memory; if we direct our attention to the memory, the movement will follow naturally. From the standpoint of pure experience the movement itself is but a continuation of the sensation of movement in recollection....We tend to think of the will as some special power, but in fact it is nothing more than the experi...