  This gives us a way to see what Bradley means when he says, in a later article, that “volition is ‘the self-realization of an idea with which the self is identified’” (Collected Essays, p. 476). In Ethical Studies the claim made is that the only thing we can aim at in acting is to realize ourselves—or, better, the structure of practical reasoning and the facts of moral psychology make it impossible that we could aim at anything other than self-realization. If volitional choice has a possible state of oneself as its object, and if one has identified one’s satisfaction with achieving this, then acting so as to realize the superior self that has been pictured is an advancing of oneself or realizing oneself. In fact, this would also be true of a case in which the intentional object represents a state of affairs not directly involving a change in oneself, for having identified one’s satisfaction with a possible state of affairs would mean that its coming to be would be also a case of advancing oneself, for in this case the agent has forced the world to conform to us. What is crucial is that the represented state be taken as the agent’s end. As Bradley notes, “all my thoughts are not my ends” and if self-realization meant no more than having an idea of a future event in our mind which later happens, “then I should realize myself practically when I see that the engine is going to run off the line, and it does so” (Ethical Studies, p. 67).