predesigning

I wish you to write a book on the power of words, and the processes by which human feelings form affinities with them -- in short, I wish you to "philosophize" Horne Tooke's system, and to solve the great questions -- whether there be reason to hold that an action bearing the semblance of predesigning consciousness may yet be simply organic, and whether a series of such actions are possible -- and close on the heels of this question would follow the old, "Is logic the essence of thinking?"

Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1803