Moreover, he contends that we can neither have idea without feeling and will, nor will without idea and feeling; that idea alone wants activity, and will alone wants content; that will is ideating and activity (vorstellende Thatigkeit), which always includes motives and ends and consequently ideas.
On the whole, his voluntarism, though like that of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, is not the same; not Schopenhauer's, because the ideating will of Wundt's philosophy is not a universal irrational will; and not Hartmann's, because, although ideating will, according to Wundt's phenomenalism, is supposed to extend through the world of organisms, the whole inorganic world remains a mere object of unitary experience.
We can only explain it by supposing that Wundt wishes to believe that, beyond the " ideal," there really is proof of a transcendent, ideating, substance-generating will of God; and that he is approaching the noumenal voluntarism of his younger contemporary Paulsen.
Hence, according to Wundt, the world we know is still unitary experience, distinguished, not separated, into subject and object, aggregates of ideas analysed by judgment and combined by inference, an object of idea elaborated into causes and substances by logical thinking, at most a world of our ideas composed out of our sensations, and arranged under our categories of our understanding by our inner wills, or a world of our ideating wills; but nothing else.
He describes it as idealism in the form of ideal realism, because it recognizes an ideating will requiring substance as substratum or matter for outer relations of phenomena.