It might be that to _reflection_ such a narrow teleology would justify

itself, that pleasures and pains might seem the only _comprehensible

and reasonable_ motives for action, the only motives on which we

_ought_ to act. That is an _ethical_ proposition, in favor of which a

good deal may be said. But it is not a _psychological_ proposition; and

nothing follows from it as to the motives upon which as a matter of

fact we _do_ act. These motives are supplied by innumerable objects,

which innervate our voluntary muscles by a process as automatic as that

by which they light a fever in our breasts. If the thought of pleasure

can impel to action, surely other thoughts may. Experience only can

decide which thoughts do. The chapters on Instinct and Emotion have

shown us that their name is legion; and with this verdict we ought to

remain contented, and not seek an illusory simplification at the cost

of half the facts.

If in these our _first_ acts pleasures and pains bear no part, as

little do they bear in our last acts, or those artificially acquired

performances which have become habitual. All the daily routine of

life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work

or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without

mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized

conditions. It is ideo-motor action. As I do not breathe for the

pleasure of the breathing, but simply find that I _am_ breathing, so

I do not write for the pleasure of the writing, but simply because I

have once begun, and being in a state of intellectual excitement which

keeps venting itself in that way, find that I _am_ writing still. Who

will pretend that when he idly fingers his knife-handle at the table,

it is for the sake of any pleasure which it gives him, or pain which he

thereby avoids. We do all these things because at the moment we cannot

help it; our nervous systems are so shaped that they overflow in just

that way; and for many of our idle or purely 'nervous' and fidgety

performances we can assign absolutely no _reason_ at all.

Or what shall be said of a shy and unsociable man who receives

point-blank an invitation to a small party? The thing is to him an

abomination; but your presence exerts a compulsion on him, he can think

of no excuse, and so says yes, cursing himself the while for what he

does. He is unusually _sui compos_ who does not every week of his life

fall into some such blundering act as this. Such instances of _voluntas

invita_ show not only that our acts cannot all be conceived as effects

of represented pleasure, but that they cannot even be classed as

cases of represented _good_. The class 'goods' contains many more

generally influential motives to action than the class 'pleasants.'

Pleasures often attract us only because we deem them goods. Mr.

Spencer, e.g., urges us to court pleasures for their influence upon

health, which comes to us as a good. But almost as little as under the

form of pleasures do our acts invariably appear to us under the form

of _goods_. All diseased impulses and pathological fixed ideas are

instances to the contrary. It is the very badness of the act that gives

it then its vertiginous fascination. Remove the prohibition, and the

attraction stops. In my university days a student threw himself from

an upper entry window of one of the college buildings and was nearly

killed. Another student, a friend of my own, had to pass the window

daily in coming and going from his room, and experienced a dreadful

temptation to imitate the deed. Being a Catholic, he told his director,

who said, 'All right! if you must, you must,' and added, 'Go ahead and

do it,' thereby instantly quenching his desire. This director knew how

to minister to a mind diseased. But we need not go to minds diseased

for examples of the occasional tempting-power of simple badness and

unpleasantness as such. Every one who has a wound or hurt anywhere, a

sore tooth, e.g., will ever and anon press it just to bring out the

pain. If we are near a new sort of stink, we must sniff it again just

to verify once more how bad it is. This very day I have been repeating

over and over to myself a verbal jingle whose mawkish silliness was the

secret of its haunting power. I loathed yet could not banish it.

Believers in the pleasure-and-pain theory must thus, if they are

candid, make large exceptions in the application of their creed. Action

from 'fixed ideas' is accordingly a terrible stumbling-block to the

candid Professor Bain. Ideas have in his psychology no impulsive but

only a 'guiding' function, whilst

"The proper stimulus of the will, namely, some variety of pleasure

and pain, is needed to give the impetus.... The intellectual link is

not sufficient for causing the deed to rise at the beck of the idea

(except in case of an 'idée fixe');" but "should any _pleasure_ spring

up or be continued, by performing an action that we clearly conceive,

the causation is then complete; both the directing and the moving

powers are present."[480]

Pleasures and pains are for Professor Bain the '_genuine_ impulses of

the will.'[481]

"Without an antecedent of pleasurable or painful feeling--actual or

ideal, primary or derivative--the will cannot be stimulated. Through

all the disguises that wrap up what we call motives, something of one

or other of these two grand conditions can be detected."[482]

Accordingly, where Professor Bain finds an exception to this rule, he

refuses to call the phenomenon a 'genuinely voluntary impulse.' The

exceptions, he admits, 'are those furnished by never-dying spontaneity,

habits, and fixed ideas.'[483] Fixed ideas 'traverse the proper course

of volition.'[484]

"_Disinterested impulses_ are wholly distinct from the attainment of

pleasure and the avoidance of pain.... The theory of disinterested

action, in the only form that I can conceive it, supposes that the

action of the will and the attainment of happiness do not square

throughout."[485]

_Sympathy_ "has this in common with the Fixed Idea, that it clashes

with the regular outgoings of the will in favor, of our pleasures."[486]

Prof. Bain thus admits all the essential facts. Pleasure and pain are

motives of only part of our activity. But he prefers to give to that

part of the activity exclusively which these feelings prompt the name

of '_regular_ outgoings' and '_genuine_ impulses' of the will,[487]

and to treat all the rest as mere paradoxes and anomalies, of which

nothing rational can be said. This amounts to taking one species of a

genus, calling it alone by the generic name, and ordering the other

co-ordinate species to find what names they may. At bottom this is only

verbal play. How much more conducive to clearness and insight it is to

take the _genus_ 'springs of action' and treat it as a whole; and then

to distinguish within it the species 'pleasure and pain' from whatever

other species may be found!

* * * * *

There is, it is true, a complication in the relation of pleasure to

action, which partly excuses those who make it the exclusive spur. This

complication deserves some notice at our hands.

An impulse which discharges itself immediately is generally quite

_neutral_ as regards pleasure or pain--the breathing impulse, for

example. If such an impulse is arrested, however, by an extrinsic

force, a great feeling of _uneasiness_ is produced--for instance, the

dyspnœa of asthma. And in proportion as the arresting force is then

overcome, _relief_ accrues--as when we draw breath again after the

asthma subsides. The relief is a pleasure and the uneasiness a pain;

and thus it happens that round all our impulses, merely as such, there

twine, as it were, secondary possibilities of pleasant and painful

feeling, involved in the manner in which the act is allowed to occur.

These _pleasures and pains of achievement, discharge, or fruition_

exist, no matter what the original spring of action be. We are glad

when we have successfully got ourselves out of a danger, though the

thought of the gladness was surely not what suggested to us to escape.

To have compassed the steps towards a proposed sensual indulgence

also makes us glad, and this gladness is a pleasure additional to the

pleasure originally proposed. On the other hand, we are chagrined and

displeased when any activity, however instigated, is hindered whilst in

process of actual discharge. We are 'uneasy' till the discharge starts

up again. And this is just as true when the action is neutral, or has

nothing but pain in view as its result, as when it was undertaken for

pleasure's express sake. The moth is probably as annoyed if hindered

from getting into the lamp-flame as the _roué_ is if interrupted in

his debauch; and we are chagrined if prevented from doing some quite

unimportant act which would have given us no noticeable pleasure if

done, merely because the prevention itself is disagreeable.

Let us now call the pleasure _for the sake_ of which the act may be

done the _pursued pleasure_. It follows that, even when no pleasure

is pursued by an act, the act itself may be the _pleasantest line_ of

conduct when once the impulse has begun, on account of the incidental

pleasure which then attends its successful achievement and the pain

which would come of interruption. A _pleasant act_ and an act _pursuing

a pleasure_ are in themselves, however, two perfectly distinct

conceptions, though they coalesce in one concrete phenomenon whenever

a pleasure is deliberately pursued. I cannot help thinking that it is

the _confusion of pursued pleasure with mere pleasure of achievement_

which makes the pleasure-theory of action so plausible to the ordinary

mind. We feel an impulse, no matter whence derived; we proceed to act;

if hindered, we feel displeasure; and if successful, relief. Action

_in the line of the present impulse_ is always for the time being the

pleasant course; and the ordinary hedonist expresses this fact by

saying that we act for the _sake_ of the pleasantness involved. But

who does not see that for this sort of pleasure to be possible, _the

impulse must be there already as an independent fact?_ The pleasure of

successful performance is the _result_ of the impulse, not its _cause_.

You cannot have your pleasure of achievement unless you have managed to

get your impulse under headway beforehand by some previous means.

It is true that on special occasions (so complex is the human mind)

_the pleasure of achievement may itself become a pursued pleasure;_

and these cases form another point on which the pleasure-theory is apt

to rally. Take a foot-ball game or a fox-hunt. Who in cold blood wants

the fox for its own sake, or cares whether the ball be at this goal

or that? We know, however, by experience, that if we can once rouse

a certain impulsive excitement in ourselves, whether to overtake the

fox, or to get the ball to one particular goal, the successful venting

of it over the counteracting checks will fill us with exceeding joy.

We therefore get ourselves deliberately and artificially into the hot

impulsive state. It takes the presence of various instinct-arousing

conditions to excite it; but little by little, once we are in the

field, it reaches its paroxysm; and we reap the reward of our exertions

in that pleasure of successful achievement which, far more than the

dead fox or the goal-got ball, was the object we originally pursued. So

it often is with duties. Lots of actions are done with heaviness all

through, and not till they are completed does pleasure emerge, in the

joy of being done with them. Like Hamlet we say of each such successive

task,

"O cursed spite,

That ever I was born to set it right!"

and then we often add to the original impulse that set us on, this

additional one, that "we shall feel so glad when well through

with it," that thought also having its impulsive spur. But because

a pleasure of achievement _can_ thus become a pursued pleasure

upon occasion, it does not follow that everywhere and always that

pleasure must be what is pursued. This, however, is what the

pleasure-philosophers seem to suppose. As well might they suppose,

because no steamer can go to sea without incidentally consuming coal,

and because some steamers may occasionally go to sea to _try_ their

coal, that therefore no steamer _can_ go to sea for any other motive

than that of coal-consumption.[488]

As we need not act for the sake of gaining the pleasure of achievement,

so neither need we act for the sake of escaping the uneasiness of

arrest. This uneasiness is altogether due to the fact that the act is

_already tending to occur_ on other grounds. And these original grounds

are what impel to its continuance, even though the uneasiness of the

arrest may upon occasion add to their impulsive power.

To conclude, I am far from denying the exceeding prominence and

importance of the part which pleasures and pains, both felt and

represented, play in the motivation of our conduct. But I must insist

that it is no exclusive part, and that co-ordinately with these mental

objects innumerable others have an exactly similar impulsive and

inhibitive power.[489]

If one must have a single name for the condition upon which the

impulsive and inhibitive quality of objects depends, one had better

call it their _interest_. 'The interesting' is a title which

covers not only the pleasant and the painful, but also the morbidly

fascinating, the tediously haunting, and even the simply habitual,

inasmuch as the attention usually travels on habitual lines, and

what-we-attend-to and what-interests-us are synonymous terms. It seems

as if we ought to look for the secret of an idea's impulsiveness,

not in any peculiar relations which it may have with paths of motor

discharge,--for _all_ ideas have relations with some such paths,--but

rather in a preliminary phenomenon, the _urgency, namely, with which it

is able to compel attention and dominate in consciousness._ Let it once

so dominate, let no other ideas succeed in displacing it, and whatever

motor effects belong to it by nature will inevitably occur--its

impulsion, in short, will be given to boot, and will manifest itself

as a matter of course. This is what we have seen in instinct, in

emotion, in common ideo-motor action, in hypnotic suggestion, in morbid

impulsion, and in _voluntas invita_,--the impelling idea is simply the

one which possesses the attention. It is the same where pleasure and

pain are the motor spurs--they drive other thoughts from consciousness

at the same time that they instigate their own characteristic

'volitional' effects. And this is also what happens at the moment

of the _fiat_, in all the five types of 'decision' which we have

described. In short, one does not see any case in which the steadfast

occupancy of consciousness does not appear to be the prime condition

of impulsive power. It is still more obviously the prime condition of

inhibitive power. What checks our impulses is the mere thinking of

reasons to the contrary--it is their bare presence to the mind which

gives the veto, and makes acts, otherwise seductive, impossible to

perform. If we could only _forget_ our scruples, our doubts, our fears,

what exultant energy we should for a while display!

WILL IS A RELATION BETWEEN THE MIND AND ITS 'IDEAS.'

In closing in, therefore, after all these preliminaries, upon the more

_intimate_ nature of the volitional process, we find ourselves driven

more and more exclusively to consider the conditions which make ideas

prevail in the mind. With the prevalence, once there as a fact, of the

motive idea the _psychology_ of volition properly stops. The movements

which ensue are exclusively physiological phenomena, following

according to physiological laws upon the neural events to which the

idea corresponds. The _willing_ terminates with the prevalence of

the idea; and whether the act then follows or not is a matter quite

immaterial, so far as the willing itself goes. I will to write, and the

act follows. I will to sneeze, and it does not. I will that the distant

table slide over the floor towards me; it also does not. My willing

representation can no more instigate my sneezing-centre than it can

instigate the table to activity. But in both cases it is as true and

good willing as it was when I willed to write.[490] In a word, volition

is a psychic or moral fact pure and simple, and is absolutely completed

when the stable state of the idea is there. The supervention of motion

is a supernumerary phenomenon depending on executive ganglia whose

function lies outside the mind.

In St. Vitus' dance, in locomotor ataxy, the representation of a

movement and the consent to it take place normally. But the inferior

executive centres are deranged, and although the ideas discharge them,

they do not discharge them so as to reproduce the precise sensations

anticipated. In aphasia the patient has an image of certain words which

he wishes to utter, but when he opens his mouth he hears himself making

quite unintended sounds. This may fill him with rage and despair--which

passions only show how intact his will remains. Paralysis only goes

a step farther. The associated mechanism is not only deranged but

altogether broken through. The volition occurs, but the hand remains

as still as the table. The paralytic is made aware of this by the

absence of the expected change in his afferent sensations. He tries

harder, i.e., he mentally frames the sensation of muscular 'effort,'

with consent that it shall occur. It does so: he frowns, he heaves his

chest, he clinches his other fist, but the palsied arm lies passive as

before.[491]

We thus find that _we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition

when we ask by what process it is that the thought of any given object

comes to prevail stably in the mind._ Where thoughts prevail without

effort, we have sufficiently studied in the several chapters on

sensation, association, and attention, the laws of their advent before

consciousness and of their stay. We will not go over that ground again,

for we know that interest and association are the words, let their

worth be what it may, on which our explanations must perforce rely.

Where, on the other hand, the prevalence of the thought is accompanied

by the phenomenon of effort, the case is much less clear. Already

in the chapter on attention we postponed the final consideration of

voluntary attention with effort to a later place. We have now brought

things to a point at which we see that attention with effort is all

that any case of volition implies. _The essential achievement of

the will, in short, when it is most 'voluntary,' is to_ ATTEND _to

a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind._ The so-doing

_is_ the _fiat_; and it is a mere physiological incident that when

the object is thus attended to, immediate motor consequences should

ensue. A _resolve_, whose contemplated motor consequences are not to

ensue until some possibly far distant future condition shall have

been fulfilled, involves all the psychic elements of a motor fiat

except the word '_now_;' and it is the same with many of our purely

theoretic beliefs. We saw in effect in the appropriate chapter, how in

the last resort belief means only a peculiar sort of occupancy of the

mind, and relation to the self felt in the thing believed; and we know

in the case of many beliefs how constant an effort of the attention

is required to keep them in this situation and protect them from

displacement by contradictory ideas.[492] (Compare above, p. 321.)

_Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will._[493]

Every reader must know by his own experience that this is so, for every

reader must have felt some fiery passion's grasp. What constitutes the

difficulty for a man laboring under an unwise passion of acting as if

the passion were unwise? Certainly there is no physical difficulty.

It is as easy physically to avoid a fight as to begin one, to pocket

one's money as to squander it on one's cupidities, to walk away from

as towards a coquette's door. The difficulty is mental; it is that of

getting the idea of the wise action to stay before our mind at all.

When any strong emotional state whatever is upon us the tendency is for

no images but such as are congruous with it to come up. If others by

chance offer themselves, they are instantly smothered and crowded out.

If we be joyous, we cannot keep thinking of those uncertainties and

risks of failure which abound upon our path; if lugubrious, we cannot

think of new triumphs, travels, loves, and joys; nor if vengeful, of

our oppressor's community of nature with ourselves. The cooling advice

which we get from others when the fever-fit is on us is the most

jarring and exasperating thing in life. Reply we cannot, so we get

angry; for by a sort of self-preserving instinct which our passion has,

it feels that these chill objects, if they once but gain a lodgment,

will work and work until they have frozen the very vital spark from out

of all our mood and brought our airy castles in ruin to the ground.

Such is the inevitable effect of reasonable ideas over others--_if they

can once get a quiet hearing;_ and passion's cue accordingly is always

and everywhere to prevent their still small voice from being heard at

all. "Let me not think of that! Don't speak to me of that!" This is

the sudden cry of all those who in a passion perceive some sobering

considerations about to check them in mid-career. "_Hæc tibi erit janua

leti_," we feel. There is something so icy in this cold-water bath,

something which seems so hostile to the movement of our life, so purely

negative, in Reason, when she lays her corpse-like finger on our heart

and says, "Halt! give up! leave off! go back! sit down!" that it is no

wonder that to most men the steadying influence seems, for the time

being, a very minister of death.

The strong-willed man, however, is the man who hears the still small

voice unflinchingly, and who, when the death-bringing consideration

comes, looks at its face, consents to its presence, clings to it,

affirms it, and holds it fast, in spite of the host of exciting mental

images which rise in revolt against it and would expel it from

the mind. Sustained in this way by a resolute effort of attention,

the difficult object erelong begins to call up its own congeners

and associates and ends by changing the disposition of the man's

consciousness altogether. And with his consciousness, his action

changes, for the new object, once stably in possession of the field

of his thoughts, infallibly produces its own motor effects. The

difficulty lies in the gaining possession of that field. Though the

spontaneous drift of thought is all the other way, the attention must

be kept strained on that one object until at last it _grows_, so as

to maintain itself before the mind with ease. This strain of the

attention is the fundamental act of will. And the will's work is in

most cases practically ended when the bare presence to our thought of

the naturally unwelcome object has been secured. For the mysterious tie

between the thought and the motor centres next comes into play, and, in

a way which we cannot even guess at, the obedience of the bodily organs

follows as a matter of course.

In all this one sees how the immediate point of application of the

volitional effort lies exclusively in the mental world. The whole drama

is a mental drama. The whole difficulty is a mental difficulty, a

difficulty with an object of our thought. If I may use the word _idea_

without suggesting associationist or Herbartian fables, I will say

that it is an idea to which our will applies itself, an idea which if

we let it go would slip away, but which we will not let go. Consent to

the idea's undivided presence, this is effort's sole achievement. Its

only function is to get this feeling of consent into the mind. And for

this there is but one way. The idea to be consented to must be kept

from flickering and going out. It must be held steadily before the mind

until it _fills_ the mind. Such filling of the mind by an idea, with

its congruous associates, _is_ consent to the idea and to the fact

which the idea represents. If the idea be that, or include that, of a

bodily movement of our own, then we call the consent thus laboriously

gained a motor volition. For Nature here 'backs' us instantaneously

and follows up our inward willingness by outward changes on her own

part. She does this in no other instance. Pity she should not have been

more generous, nor made a world whose other parts were as immediately

subject to our will!

* * * * *

On page 531, in describing the 'reasonable type' of decision, it was

said that it usually came when the right conception of the case was

found. Where, however, the right conception is an anti-inpulsive one,

the whole intellectual ingenuity of the man usually goes to work to

crowd it out of sight, and to find names for the emergency, by the help

of which the dispositions of the moment may sound sanctified, and sloth

or passion may reign unchecked. How many excuses does the drunkard find

when each new temptation comes! It is a new brand of liquor which the

interests of intellectual culture in such matters oblige him to test;

moreover it is poured out and it is sin to waste it; or others are

drinking and it would be churlishness to refuse; or it is but to enable

him to sleep, or just to get through this job of work; or it isn't

drinking, it is because he feels so cold; or it is Christmas-day; or

it is a means of stimulating him to make a more powerful resolution in

favor of abstinence than any he has hitherto made; or it is just this

once, and once doesn't count, etc., etc., _ad libitum_--it is, in fact,

anything you like except _being a drunkard. That_ is the conception

that will not stay before the poor soul's attention. But if he once

gets able to pick out that way of conceiving, from all the other

possible ways of conceiving the various opportunities which occur, if

through thick and thin he holds to it that this is being a drunkard and

is nothing else, he is not likely to remain one long. The effort by

which he succeeds in keeping the right _name_ unwaveringly present to

his mind proves to be his saving moral act.[494]

Everywhere then the function of the effort is the same: to keep

affirming and adopting a thought which, if left to itself, would slip

away. It may be cold and flat when the spontaneous mental drift is

towards excitement, or great and arduous when the spontaneous drift is

towards repose. In the one case the effort has to inhibit an explosive,

in the other to arouse an obstructed will. The exhausted sailor on a

wreck has a will which is obstructed. One of his ideas is that of his

sore hands, of the nameless exhaustion of his whole frame which the act

of farther pumping involves, and of the deliciousness of sinking into

sleep. The other is that of the hungry sea ingulfing him. "Rather the

aching toil!" he says; and it becomes reality then, in spite of the

inhibiting influence of the relatively luxurious sensations which he

gets from lying still. But exactly similar in form would be his consent

to lie and sleep. Often it is the thought of sleep and what leads to it

which is the hard one to keep before the mind. If a patient afflicted

with insomnia can only control the whirling chase of his thoughts so

far as to think of _nothing at all_ (which can be done), or so far as

to imagine one letter after another of a verse of scripture or poetry

spelt slowly and monotonously out, it is almost certain that here,

too, specific bodily effects will follow, and that sleep will come.

The trouble is to keep the mind upon a train of objects naturally so

insipid. _To sustain a representation, to think,_ is, in short, the

only moral act, for the impulsive and the obstructed, for sane and

lunatics alike. Most maniacs know their thoughts to be crazy, but find

them too pressing to be withstood. Compared with them the sane truths

are so deadly sober, so cadaverous, that the lunatic cannot bear to

look them in the face and say, "Let these alone be my reality!" But

with sufficient effort, as Dr. Wigan says,

"Such a man can for a time _wind himself up_, as it were, and

determine that the notions of the disordered brain shall not be

manifested. Many instances are on record similar to that told

by Pinel, where an inmate of the Bicêtre, having stood a long

cross-examination, and given every mark of restored reason, signed

his name to the paper authorizing his discharge 'Jesus Christ,' and

then went off into all the vagaries connected with that delusion. In

the phraseology of the gentleman whose case is related in an early

part of this [Wigan's] work he had 'held himself tight' during the

examination in order to attain his object; this once accomplished he

'let himself down' again, and, if even _conscious_ of his delusion,

could not control it. I have observed with such persons that it

requires a considerable time to wind themselves up to the pitch of

complete self-control, that the effort is a painful tension of the

mind.... When thrown off their guard by any accidental remark or worn

out by the length of the examination, they _let themselves go_, and

cannot gather themselves up again without preparation. Lord Erskine

relates the story of a man who brought an action against Dr. Munro for

confining him without cause. He underwent the most rigid examination

by the counsel for the defendant without discovering any appearance

of insanity, till a gentleman asked him about a princess with whom he

corresponded in cherry-juice, and he became instantly insane."[495]

To sum it all up in a word, _the terminus of the psychological process

in volition, the point to which the will is directly applied, is always

an idea._ There are at all times _some_ ideas from which we shy away

like frightened horses the moment we get a glimpse of their forbidding

profile upon the threshold of our thought. _The only resistance which

our will can possibly experience is the resistance which such an idea

offers to being attended to at all._ To attend to it is the volitional

act, and the only inward volitional act which we ever perform.

* * * * *

I have put the thing in this ultra-simple way because I want more

than anything else to emphasize the fact that volition is primarily

a relation, not between our Self and extra-mental matter (as many

philosophers still maintain) but between our Self and our own states of

mind. But when, a short while ago, I spoke of the filling of the mind

with an idea as being equivalent to consent to the idea's object, I

said something which the reader doubtless questioned at the time, and

which certainly now demands some qualification ere we pass beyond.

It is unqualifiedly true that if any thought _do_ fill the mind

exclusively, such filling is consent. The thought, for that time at any

rate, carries the man and his will with it. But it is not true that the

thought _need_ fill the mind exclusively for consent to be there; for

we often consent to things whilst thinking of other things, even of

hostile things; and we saw in fact that precisely what distinguishes

our 'fifth type' of decision from the other types (see p. 534) is

just this coexistence with the triumphant thought of other thoughts

which would inhibit it but for the effort which makes it prevail.

The effort to _attend_ is therefore only a part of what the word

'will' covers; it covers also the effort to _consent_ to something to

which our attention is not quite complete. Often, when an object has

gained our attention exclusively, and its motor results are just on

the point of setting in, it seems as if the sense of their imminent

irrevocability were enough of itself to start up the inhibitory ideas

and to make us pause. Then we need a new stroke of effort to break down

the sudden hesitation which seizes upon us, and to persevere. So that

although attention is the first and fundamental thing in volition,

_express consent to the reality of what is attended to_ is often an

additional and quite distinct phenomenon involved.

The reader's own consciousness tells him of course just what these

words of mine denote. And I freely confess that I am impotent to carry

the analysis of the matter any farther, or to explain in other terms

of what this consent consists. It seems a subjective experience _sui

generis_, which we can designate but not define. We stand here exactly

where we did in the case of belief. When an idea _stings_ us in a

certain way, makes as it were a certain electric connection with our

self, we believe that it _is_ a reality. When it stings us in another

way, makes another connection with our Self, we say, _let it be_ a

reality. To the word 'is' and to the words 'let it be' there correspond

peculiar attitudes of consciousness which it is vain to seek to

explain. The indicative and the imperative moods are as much ultimate

categories of thinking as they are of grammar. The 'quality of reality'

which these moods attach to things is not like other qualities. It is

a relation to our life. It means _our_ adoption of the things, _our_

caring for them, _our_ standing by them. This at least is what it

practically means for us; what it may mean beyond that we do not know.

And the transition from merely considering an object as possible, to

deciding or willing it to be real; the change from the fluctuating

to the stable personal attitude concerning it; from the 'don't care'

state of mind to that in which 'we mean business,' is one of the most

familiar things in life. We can partly enumerate its conditions; and

we can partly trace its consequences, especially the momentous one

that when the mental object is a movement of our own body, it realizes

itself outwardly when the mental change in question has occurred. But

the change itself as a subjective phenomenon is something which we can

translate into no simpler terms.

THE QUESTION OF 'FREE-WILL.'

Especially must we, when talking about it, rid our mind of

the fabulous warfare of separate agents called 'ideas.' The

brain-processes may be agents, and the thought as such may be an

agent. But what the ordinary psychologies call 'ideas' are nothing

but parts of the total _object_ of representation. All that is

before the mind at once, no matter how complex a system of things

and relations it may be, is one object for the thought. Thus,

'A-and-B-and-their-mutual-incompatibility-and-the-fact-that-only-one-

can-be-true-or-can-become-real-notwithstanding-the-probability-or-

desirability-of-both' may be such a complex object; and where the

thought is deliberative its object has always some such form as

this. When, now, we pass from deliberation to decision, that total

object undergoes a change. We either dismiss A altogether and its

relations to B, and think of B exclusively; or after thinking of both

as possibilities, we next think that A is impossible, and that B is

or forthwith shall be real. In either case a _new_ object is before

our thought; and where effort exists, it is where the change from the

first object to the second one is hard. Our thought seems to turn in

this case like a heavy door on rusty hinges; only, so far as the effort

feels spontaneous, it turns, not as if by some one helping, but as if

by an inward activity, born for the occasion, of its own.

The psychologists who discussed 'the muscular sense' at the

international congress at Paris in 1889 agreed at the end that they

needed to come to a better understanding in regard to this appearance

of internal activity at the moment when a decision is made. M.

Fouillée, in an article which I find more interesting and suggestive

than coherent or conclusive,[496] seems to resolve our sense of

activity into that of our very _existence as thinking entities_. At

least so I translate his words.[497] But we saw in Chapter X how hard

it is to lay a verifying finger plainly upon the thinking process as

such, and to distinguish it from certain objects of the stream. M.

Fouillée admits this; but I do not think he fully realizes how strong

would be the position of a man who should suggest (see Vol. I. p.

301) that the feeling of moral activity itself which accompanies the

advent of certain 'objects' before the mind is nothing but certain

other objects,--constrictions, namely, in the brows, eyes, throat, and

breathing apparatus, present then, but absent from other pulses of

subjective change. Were this the truth, then a part, at any rate, of

the activity of which we become aware in effort would seem merely to be

that of our body; and many thinkers would probably thereupon conclude

that this 'settles the claims' of inner activity, and dismisses the

whole notion of such a thing as a superfluity in psychological science.

I cannot see my way to so extreme a view; even although I must

repeat the confession made on pp. 296-7 of Vol. I, that I do not

_fully_ understand how we come to our unshakable belief that thinking

exists as a special kind of immaterial process alongside of the

material processes of the world. It is certain, however, that only by

_postulating_ such thinking do we make things currently intelligible;

and it is certain that no psychologist has as yet denied the _fact_ of

thinking, the utmost that has been denied being its dynamic power. But

if we postulate the fact of the thinking at all, I believe that we must

postulate its power as well; nor do I see how we can rightly equalize

its power with its mere existence, and say (as M. Fouillée seems to

say) that for the thought-process to _go on at all_ is an activity,

and an activity everywhere the same; for certain steps forward in this

process seem _prima facie_ to be passive, and other steps (as where an

object comes with effort) seem _prima facie_ to be active in a supreme

degree. If we admit, therefore, that our thoughts _exist_, we ought

to admit that they exist after the fashion in which they appear, as

things, namely, that supervene upon each other, sometimes with effort

and sometimes with ease; the only questions being, is the effort where

it exists a fixed function of the _object_, which the latter imposes

on the thought? or is it such an independent 'variable' that with a

constant object more or less of it may be made?

It certainly appears to us indeterminate, and as if, even with an

unchanging object, we might make more or less, as we choose. If it be

really indeterminate, our future acts are ambiguous or unpredestinate:

in common parlance, _our wills are free_. If the amount of effort be

not indeterminate, but be related in a fixed manner to the objects

themselves, in such wise that whatever object at any time fills our

consciousness was from eternity bound to fill it then and there, and

compel from us the exact effort, neither more nor less, which we

bestow upon it,--then our wills are not free, and all our acts are

foreordained. _The question of fact in the free-will controversy is

thus extremely simple._ It relates solely to the amount of effort

of attention or consent which we can at any time put forth. Are the

duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object,

or are they not? Now, as I just said, it _seems_ as if the effort were

an independent variable, as if we might exert more or less of it in

any given case. When a man has let his thoughts go for days and weeks

until at last they culminate in some particularly dirty or cowardly or

cruel act, it is hard to persuade him, in the midst of his remorse,

that he might not have reined them in; hard to make him believe that

this whole goodly universe (which his act so jars upon) required

and exacted it of him at that fatal moment, and from eternity made

aught else impossible. But, on the other hand, there is the certainty

that all his _effortless_ volitions are resultants of interests and

associations whose strength and sequence are mechanically determined

by the structure of that physical mass, his brain; and the general

continuity of things and the monistic conception of the world may lead

one irresistibly to postulate that a little fact like effort can form

no real exception to the overwhelming reign of deterministic law. Even

in effortless volition we have the consciousness of the alternative

being also possible. This is surely a delusion here; why is it not a

delusion everywhere?

My own belief is that the question of free-will is insoluble on

strictly psychologic grounds. After a certain amount of effort of

attention has been given to an idea, it is manifestly impossible to

tell whether either more or less of it _might_ have been given or

not. To tell that, we should have to ascend to the antecedents of the

effort, and defining them with mathematical exactitude, prove, by

laws of which we have not at present even an inkling, that the only

amount of sequent effort which could _possibly_ comport with them

was the precise amount which actually came. Measurements, whether of

psychic or of neural quantities, and deductive reasonings such as this

method of proof implies, will surely be forever beyond human reach.

No serious psychologist or physiologist will venture even to suggest

a notion of how they might be practically made. We are thrown back

therefore upon the crude evidences of introspection on the one hand,

with all its liabilities to deception, and, on the other hand, upon

_a priori_ postulates and probabilities. He who loves to balance nice

doubts need be in no hurry to decide the point. Like Mephistopheles

to Faust, he can say to himself, "_dazu hast du noch eine lange

Frist_," for from generation to generation the reasons adduced on both

sides will grow more voluminous, and the discussion more refined.

But if our speculative delight be less keen, if the love of a _parti

pris_ outweighs that of keeping questions open, or if, as a French

philosopher of genius says, "_l'amour de la vie qui s'indigne de tant

de discours_," awakens in us, craving the sense of either peace or

power,--then, taking the risk of error on our head, we must project

upon one of the alternative views the attribute of reality for us; we

must so fill our mind with the idea of it that it becomes our settled

creed. The present writer does this for the alternative of freedom, but

since the grounds of his opinion are ethical rather than psychological,

he prefers to exclude them from the present book.[498]

* * * * *

A few words, however, may be permitted about the logic of the question.

The most that any argument can do for determinism is to make it a clear

and seductive conception, which a man is foolish not to espouse, so

long as he stands by the great scientific postulate that the world

must be one unbroken fact, and that prediction of all things without

exception must be ideally, even if not actually, possible. It is a

_moral_ postulate about the Universe, the postulate that _what ought

to be can be, and that bad acts cannot be fated, but that good ones

must be possible in their place,_ which would lead one to espouse

the contrary view. But when scientific and moral postulates war thus

with each other and objective proof is not to be had, the only course

is voluntary choice, for scepticism itself, if systematic, is also

voluntary choice. If, meanwhile, the will _be_ undetermined, it would

seem only fitting that the belief in its indetermination should be

voluntarily chosen from amongst other possible beliefs. Freedom's first

deed should be to affirm itself. We ought never to hope for any other

method of getting at the truth if indeterminism be a fact. Doubt of

this particular truth will therefore probably be open to us to the end

of time, and the utmost that a believer in free-will can _ever_ do

will be to show that the deterministic arguments are not coercive. That

they are seductive, I am the last to deny; nor do I deny that effort

may be needed to keep the faith in freedom, when they press upon it,

upright in the mind.

There is a _fatalistic argument_ for determinism, however, which is

radically vicious. When a man has let himself go time after time, he

easily becomes impressed with the enormously preponderating influence

of circumstances, hereditary habits, and temporary bodily dispositions

over what might seem a spontaneity born for the occasion. "All is

fate," he then says; "all is resultant of what pre-exists. Even if

the moment seems original, it is but the instable molecules passively

tumbling in their preappointed way. It is hopeless to resist the

drift, vain to look for any new force coming in; and less, perhaps,

than anywhere else under the sun is there anything really mine in

the decisions which I make." This is really no argument for simple

determinism. There runs throughout it the sense of a force which might

make things otherwise from one moment to another, if it were only

strong enough to breast the tide. A person who feels the _impotence_

of free effort in this way has the acutest notion of what is meant

by it, and of its possible independent power. How else could he be

so conscious of its absence and of that of its effects? But genuine

determinism occupies a totally different ground; not the _impotence_

but the _unthinkability_ of free-will is what it affirms. It admits

something phenomenal _called_ free effort, which _seems_ to breast the

tide, but it claims this as a _portion of the tide_. The variations

of the effort cannot be independent, it says; they cannot originate

_ex nihilo_, or come from a fourth dimension; they are mathematically

fixed functions of the ideas themselves, which are the tide. Fatalism,

which conceives of effort clearly enough as an independent variable

that might come from a fourth dimension if it _would_ come, but that

does _not_ come, is a very dubious ally for determinism. It strongly

imagines that very possibility which determinism denies.

But what, quite as much as the inconceivability of absolutely

independent variables, persuades modern men of science that their

efforts must be predetermined, is the continuity of the latter with

other phenomena whose predetermination no one doubts. Decisions with

effort merge so gradually into those without it that it is not easy to

say where the limit lies. Decisions without effort merge again into

ideo-motor, and these into reflex acts; so that the temptation is

almost irresistible to throw the formula which covers so many cases

over absolutely all. Where there is effort just as where there is

none, the ideas themselves which furnish the matter of deliberation

are brought before the mind by the machinery of association. And this

machinery is essentially a system of arcs and paths, a reflex system,

whether effort be amongst its incidents or not. The reflex way is,

after all, the universal way of conceiving the business. The feeling

of _ease_ is a passive result of the way in which the thoughts unwind

themselves. Why is not the feeling of effort the same? Professor

Lipps, in his admirably clear deterministic statement, so far from

admitting that the feeling of effort testifies to an increment of force

exerted, explains it as a sign that force is lost. We speak of effort,

according to him, whenever a force expends itself (wholly or partly) in

neutralizing another force, and so fails of its own possible outward

effect. The outward effect of the antagonistic force, however, also

fails in corresponding measure, "so that there is no effort without

counter-effort,... and effort and counter-effort signify only that

causes are mutually robbing each other of effectiveness."[499] Where

the forces are ideas, both sets of them, strictly speaking, are the

seat of effort--both those which tend to explode, and those which

tend to check them. We, however, call the more abundant mass of ideas

_ourselves_; and, talking of its effort as _our_ effort, and of that

of the smaller mass of ideas as the _resistance_,[500] we say that our

effort sometimes overcomes the resistances offered by the inertias of

an obstructed, and sometimes those presented by the impulsions of an

explosive, will. Really both effort and resistance are ours, and the

identification of our _self_ with one of these factors is an illusion

and a trick of speech. I do not see how anyone can fail (especially

when the mythologic dynamism of separate 'ideas,' which Professor Lipps

cleaves to, is translated into that of brain-processes) to recognize

the fascinating simplicity of some such view as his. Nor do I see why

_for scientific purposes_ one need give it up even if indeterminate

amounts of effort really do occur. Before their indeterminism, science

simply _stops_. She can abstract from it altogether, then; for in the

impulses and inhibitions with which the effort has to cope there is

already a larger field of uniformity than she can ever practically

cultivate. Her prevision will never foretell, even if the effort be

completely predestinate, the actual way in which each individual

emergency is resolved. Psychology will be Psychology,[501] and Science

Science, as much as ever (as much and no more) in this world, whether

free will be true in it or not. Science, however, must be constantly

reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes, and that the

order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore

right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she

has no claims at all.

We can therefore leave the free-will question altogether out of our

account. As we said in Chapter VI (vol. I. p. 453), the operation

of free effort, if it existed, could only be to hold some one

ideal object, or part of an object, a little longer or a little

more intensely before the mind. Amongst the alternatives which

present themselves as _genuine possibles_, it would thus make one

effective.[502] And although such quickening of one idea might be

_morally and historically momentous_, yet, if considered _dynamically_,

it would be an operation amongst those physiological infinitesimals

which calculation must forever neglect.

But whilst eliminating the question about the amount of our effort as

one which psychology will never have a practical call to decide, I must

say one word about the extraordinarily intimate and important character

which the phenomenon of effort assumes in our own eyes as individual

men. Of course we measure ourselves by many standards. Our strength and

our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which

warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper

than all such things, and able to suffice unto itself without them, is

the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth. Those are,

after all, but effects, products, and reflections of the outer world

within. But the effort seems to belong to an altogether different

realm, as if it were the substantive thing which we _are_, and those

were but externals which we _carry_. If the 'searching of our heart and

reins' be the purpose of this human drama, then what is sought seems

to be what effort we can make. He who can make none is but a shadow;

he who can make much is a hero. The huge world that girdles us about

puts all sorts of questions to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways.

Some of the tests we meet by actions that are easy, and some of the

questions we answer in articulately formulated words. But the deepest

question that is ever asked admits of no reply but the dumb turning of

the will and tightening of our heartstrings as we say, "_Yes, I will

even have it so!_" When a dreadful object is presented, or when life

as a whole turns up its dark abysses to our view, then the worthless

ones among us lose their hold on the situation altogether, and either

escape from its difficulties by averting their attention, or if they

cannot do that, collapse into yielding masses of plaintiveness and

fear. The effort required for facing and consenting to such objects is

beyond their power to make. But the heroic mind does differently. To

it, too, the objects are sinister and dreadful, unwelcome, incompatible

with wished-for things. But it can face them if necessary, without for

that losing its hold upon the rest of life. The world thus finds in the

heroic man its worthy match and mate; and the effort which he is able

to put forth to hold himself erect and keep his heart unshaken is the

direct measure of his worth and function in the game of human life. He

can _stand_ this Universe. He can meet it and keep up his faith in it

in presence of those same features which lay his weaker brethren low.

He can still find a zest in it, not by 'ostrich-like forgetfulness,'

but by pure inward willingness to face the world with those deterrent

objects there. And hereby he becomes one of the masters and the lords

of life. He must be counted with henceforth; he forms a part of human

destiny. Neither in the theoretic nor in the practical sphere do we

care for, or go for help to, those who have no head for risks, or sense

for living on the perilous edge. Our religious life lies more, our

practical life lies less, than it used to, on the perilous edge. But

just as our courage is so often a reflex of another's courage, so our

faith is apt to be, as Max Müller somewhere says, a faith in some one

else's faith. We draw new life from the heroic example. The prophet

has drunk more deeply than anyone of the cup of bitterness, but his

countenance is so unshaken and he speaks such mighty words of cheer

that his will becomes our will, and our life is kindled at his own.

Thus not only our morality but our religion, so far as the latter is

deliberate, depend on the effort which we can make. "_Will you or won't

you have it so_?" is the most probing question we are ever asked; we

are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest as well as

the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical,

things. We answer by _consents or non-consents_ and not by words.

What wonder that these dumb responses should seem our deepest organs

of communication with the nature of things! What wonder if the effort

demanded by them be the measure of our worth as men! What wonder if the

amount which we accord of it be the one strictly underived and original

contribution which we make to the world!

THE EDUCATION OF THE WILL.

The education of the will may be taken in a broader or a narrower

sense. In the broader sense, it means the whole of one's training

to moral and prudential conduct, and of one's learning to adapt

means to ends, involving the 'association of ideas,' in all its

varieties and complications, together with the power of inhibiting

impulses irrelevant to the ends desired, and of initiating movements

contributory thereto. It is the acquisition of these latter powers

which I mean by the education of the will in the narrower sense. And

it is in this sense alone that it is worth while to treat the matter

here.[503]

Since a willed movement is a movement preceded by an idea of itself,

the problem of the will's education is the problem of how the idea of

a movement can arouse the movement itself. This, as we have seen, is

a secondary kind of process; for framed as we are, we can have no _a

priori_ idea of a movement, no idea of a movement which we have not

already performed. Before the idea can be generated, the movement must

have occurred in a blind, unexpected way, and left its idea behind.

_Reflex, instinctive,_ or _random execution_ of a _movement_ must, in

other words, precede its voluntary execution. Reflex and instinctive

movements have already been considered sufficiently for the purposes

of this book. 'Random' movements are mentioned so as to include

_quasi_-accidental reflexes from inner causes, or movements possibly

arising from such overflow of nutrition in special centres as Prof.

Bain postulates in his explanation of those 'spontaneous discharges'

by which he sets such great store in his derivation of the voluntary

life.[504]

Now _how can the sensory process which a movement has previously

produced, discharge, when excited again, into the centre for the

movement itself?_ On the movement's original occurrence the motor

discharge came first and the sensory process second; now in the

voluntary repetition the sensory process (excited in weak or

'ideational' form) comes first, and the motor discharge comes second.

To tell how this comes to pass would be to answer the problem of the

education of the will in physiological terms. Evidently the problem is

that of the formation of _new paths_; and the only thing to do is to

make hypotheses, till we find some which seem to cover all the facts.

How is a fresh path ever formed? All paths are paths of discharge,

and the discharge always takes place in the direction of least

resistance, whether the cell which discharges be 'motor' or 'sensory.'

The _connate_ paths of least resistance are the paths of instinctive

reaction; and I submit as my first hypothesis that _these paths all

run one way, that is from 'sensory' cells into 'motor' cells and from

motor cells into muscles, without ever taking the reverse direction._

A motor cell, for example, never awakens a sensory cell directly,

but only through the incoming current caused by the bodily movements

to which its discharge gives rise. And a sensory cell _always_

discharges or normally tends to discharge towards the motor region.

Let this direction be called the 'forward' direction. I call the law

an hypothesis, but really it is an indubitable truth. No impression or

idea of eye, ear, or skin comes to us without occasioning a movement,

even though the movement be no more than the accommodation of the

sense-organ; and all our trains of sensation and sensational imagery

have their terms alternated and interpenetrated with motor processes,

of most of which we practically are unconscious. Another way of stating

the rule is to say that, primarily or connately, all currents through

the brain run towards the Rolandic region, and that there they run

out, and never return upon themselves. From this point of view the

distinction of sensory and motor cells has no fundamental significance.

All cells are motor; we simply call those of the Rolandic region, those

nearest the mouth of the funnel, the motor cells _par excellence_.

A corollary of this law is that 'sensory' cells do not awaken each

other connately; that is, that no one sensible property of things has

any tendency, in advance of experience, to awaken in us the idea of any

other sensible properties which in the nature of things may go with

it. _There is no a priori calling up of one 'idea' by another;_ the

only _a priori_ couplings are of ideas with movements. All suggestions

of one sensible fact by another take place by secondary paths which

experience has formed.

[Illustration: FIG. 87.]

The diagram (Fig. 87)[505] shows what happens in a nervous system

ideally reduced to the fewest possible terms. A stimulus reaching

the sense-organ awakens the sensory cell, S; this by the connate or

instinctive path discharges the motor cell, M, which makes the muscle

contract; and the contraction arouses the second sensory cell, K,

which may be the organ either of a 'resident' or 'kinæsthetic,' or

of a 'remote,' sensation. (See above, p. 488.) This cell K again

discharges into M. If this were the entire nervous mechanism, the

movement, once begun, would be self-maintaining, and would stop only

when the parts were exhausted. And this, according to M. Pierre

Janet, is what actually happens in _catalepsy_. A cataleptic patient

is anæsthetic, speechless, motionless. Consciousness, so far as we

can judge, is abolished. Nevertheless the limbs will retain whatever

position is impressed upon them from without, and retain it so long

that if it be a strained and unnatural position, the phenomenon is

regarded by Charcot as one of the few conclusive tests against hypnotic

subjects shamming, since hypnotics can be made cataleptic, and then

keep their limbs outstretched for a length of time quite unattainable

by the waking will. M. Janet thinks that in all these cases the

outlying ideational processes in the brain are temporarily thrown out

of gear. The kinæsthetic sensation of the raised arm, for example,

is produced in the patient when the operator raises the arm, this

sensation discharges into the motor cell, which through the muscle

reproduces the sensation, etc., the currents running in this closed

circle until they grow so weak, by exhaustion of the parts, that the

member slowly drops. We may call this circle from the muscle to K, from

K to M, and from M to the muscle again, the 'motor circle.' _We should

all be cataleptics and never stop a muscular contraction once begun,

were it not that other processes simultaneously going on inhibit the

contraction. Inhibition is therefore not an occasional accident; it

is an essential and unremitting element of our cerebral life._ It is

interesting to note that Dr. Mercier, by a different path of reasoning,

is also led to conclude that we owe to outside inhibitions exclusively

our power to arrest a movement once begun.[506]

One great inhibitor of the discharge of K into M seems to be the

painful or otherwise displeasing quality of the sensation itself of

K; and conversely, when this sensation is distinctly pleasant, that

fact tends to further K's discharge into M, and to keep the primordial

motor circle agoing. Tremendous as the part is which pleasure and pain

play in our psychic life, we must confess that absolutely nothing is

known of their cerebral conditions. It is hard to imagine them as

having special centres; it is harder still to invent peculiar forms

of process in each and every centre, to which these feelings may be

due. And let one try as one will to represent the cerebral activity

in exclusively mechanical terms, I, for one, find it quite impossible

to enumerate what seem to be the facts and yet to make no mention of

the psychic side which they possess. However it be with other drainage

currents and discharges, the drainage currents and discharges of

the brain are not purely physical facts. They are _psycho-physical_

facts, and the spiritual quality of them seems a codeterminant of

their mechanical effectiveness. If the mechanical activities in a

cell, as they increase, give pleasure, they seem to increase all the

more rapidly for that fact; if they give displeasure, the displeasure

seems to damp the activities. The psychic side of the phenomenon

thus seems, somewhat like the applause or hissing at a spectacle, to

be an encouraging or adverse _comment_ on what the machinery brings

forth. The soul _presents_ nothing herself; _creates_ nothing; is at

the mercy of the material forces for all _possibilities_; but amongst

these possibilities she _selects_; and by reinforcing one and checking

others, she figures not as an 'epiphenomenon,' but as something from

which the play gets moral support. I shall therefore never hesitate

to invoke the efficacy of the conscious comment, where no strictly

mechanical reason appears why a current escaping from a cell should

take one path rather than another.[507] But the _existence_ of the

current, and its _tendency_ towards either path, I feel bound to

account for by mechanical laws.

* * * * *

Having now considered a nervous system reduced to its lowest possible

terms, in which all the paths are connate, and the possibilities of

inhibition not extrinsic, but due solely to the agreeableness or

disagreeableness of the feeling aroused, let us turn to the conditions

under which new paths may be formed. Potentialities of new paths

are furnished by the fibres which connect the sensory cells amongst

themselves; but these fibres are not originally pervious, and have

to be made so by a process which I proceed hypothetically to state

as follows: _Each discharge from a sensory cell in the forward

direction_[508] _tends to drain the cells lying behind the discharging

one of whatever tension they may possess. The drainage from the

rearward cells is what for the first time makes the fibres pervious.

The result is a new-formed 'path,' running from the cells which were

'rearward' to the cell which was 'forward' on that occasion; which

path, if on future occasions the rearward cells are independently

excited, will tend to carry off their activity in the same direction so

as to excite the_ _forward cell, and will deepen itself more and more

every time it is used_.

Now the 'rearward cells,' so far, stand for all the sensory cells

of the brain other than the one which is discharging; but such an

indefinitely broad path would practically be no better than no path, so

here I make a third hypothesis, which, taken together with the others,

seems to me to cover all the facts. It is that _the deepest paths are

formed from the most drainable to the most draining cells;_ that _the

most drainable cells are those which have just been discharging,_ and

that _the most draining cells are those which are now discharging or

in which the tension is rising towards the point of discharge._[509]

Another diagram, Fig. 88, will make the matter clear. Take the

operation represented by the previous diagram at the moment when, the

muscular contraction having occurred, the cell K is discharging forward

into M. Through the dotted line _p_ it will, according to our third

hypothesis, drain S (which, in the supposed case, has just discharged

into M by the connate path P, and caused the muscular contraction), and

the result is that _p_ will now remain as a new path open from S to K.

When next S is excited from without it will tend not only to discharge

into M, but into K as well. K thus gets excited directly by S _before_

it gets excited by the incoming current from the muscle; or, translated

into psychic terms: _when a sensation has once produced a movement in

us, the next time we have the sensation, it tends to suggest the idea

of the movement, even before the movement occurs._[510]

[Illustration: FIG. 88.]

The same principles also apply to the relations of K and M. M, lying in

the forward direction, drains K, and the path KM, even though it be no

primary or connate path, becomes a secondary or habitual one. Hereafter

K may be aroused in any way whatsoever (not as before from S or from

without) and still it will tend to discharge into M; or, to express it

again in psychic terms, _the idea of the movement M's sensory effects

will have become an immediately antecedent condition to the production

of the movement itself._

Here, then, we have the answer to our original question of how a

sensory process which, the first time it occurred, was the effect of a

movement, can later figure as the movement's cause.

* * * * *

It is obvious on this scheme that the cell which we have marked K

may stand for the seat of either a resident or a remote sensation

occasioned by the motor discharge. It may indifferently be a tactile,

a visual, or an auditory cell. The idea of how the arm _feels_ when

raised may cause it to rise; but no less may the idea of some _sound_

which it makes in rising, or of some _optical_ impression which it

produces. Thus we see that the 'mental cue' may belong to either of

various senses; and that what our diagrams lead us to infer is what

really happens; namely, that in our movements, such as that of speech,

for example, in some of us it is the tactile, in others the acoustic,

_Effectsbild_, or memory-image, which seems most concerned in starting

the articulation (Vol. I. pp. 54-5). The _primitive_ 'starters,'

however, of all our movements are not _Effectsbilder_ at all, but

sensations and objects, and subsequently ideas derived therefrom.

* * * * *

Let us now turn to the more complex and serially concatenated movements

which oftenest meet us in real life. The object of our will is seldom

a single muscular contraction; it is almost always an orderly sequence

of contractions, ending with a sensation which tells us that the goal

is reached. But the several contractions of the sequence are not each

distinctly willed; each earlier one seems rather, by the sensation

it produces, to call its follower up, after the fashion described in

Chapter VI, where we spoke of habitual concatenated movements being

due to a series of secondarily organized reflex arcs (Vol. I. p. 116).

The first contraction is the one distinctly willed, and after willing

it we let the rest of the chain rattle off of its own accord. How now

is such an orderly concatenation of movements originally learned? or in

other words, how are paths formed for the first time between one motor

centre and another, so that the discharge of the first centre makes the

others discharge in due order all along the line?

The phenomenon involves a rapid alternation of motor discharges and

resultant afferent impressions, for as long a time as it lasts. They

must be associated in one definite order; and the order must once have

been _learned_, i.e., it must have been picked out and held to more

and more exclusively out of the many other random orders which first

presented themselves. The random afferent impressions fell out, those

that felt right were selected and grew together in the chain. A chain

which we actively teach ourselves by stringing a lot of right-feeling

impressions together differs in no essential respect from a chain

which we passively learn from someone else who gives us impressions

in a certain order. So to make our ideas more precise, let us take a

particular concatenated movement for an example, and let it be the

recitation of the alphabet, which someone in our childhood taught us to

say by heart.

What we have seen so far is how the idea of the sound or articulatory

feeling of A may make us say 'A,' that of B, 'B,' and so on. But what

we now want to see is _why the sensation that A is uttered should make

us say 'B,' why the sensation that B is uttered should make us say 'C,'

and so on._

[Illustration: FIG. 89.]

To understand this we must recall what happened when we first learned

the letters in their order. Someone repeated A, B, C, D to us over and

over again, and we imitated the sounds. Sensory cells corresponding

to each letter were awakened in succession in such wise that each one

of them (by virtue of our second law) must have 'drained' the cell

just previously excited and left a path by which that cell tended ever

afterwards to discharge into the cell that drained it. Let S^a, S^b,

S^c in figure 89 stand for three of these cells. Each later one of

them, as it discharges motorwards, draws a current from the previous

one, S^b from S^a, and S^c from S^b. Cell S^b having thus drained S^a,

if S^a ever gets excited again, it tends to discharge into S^b; whilst

S^c having drained S^b, S^b later discharges into S^c, etc., etc.--all

through the dotted lines. Let now the idea of the letter A arise in the

mind, or, in other words, let S^a be aroused: what happens? A current

runs from S^a not only into the motor cell M^a for pronouncing that

letter, but also into the cell S^b. When, a moment later, the effect

of M^a's discharge comes back by the afferent nerve and re-excites

S^a, this latter cell is inhibited from discharging again into M^a and

reproducing the 'primordial motor circle' (which in this case would

be the continued utterance of the letter A), by the fact that the

process in S^b, already under headway and tending to discharge into

its own motor associate M^b, is, _under the existing conditions_, the

stronger drainage-channel for S^a's excitement. The result is that M^b

discharges and the letter B is pronounced; whilst at the same time S^c

receives some of S^b's overflow; and, a moment later when the sound of

B enters the ear, discharges into the motor cell for pronouncing C, by

a repetition of the same mechanism as before; and so on _ad libitum_.

Figure 90 represents the entire set of processes involved.

[Illustration: FIG. 90.]

The only thing that one does not immediately see is the reason why

'under the existing conditions' the path from S^a to S^b should be

the stronger drainage-channel for S^a's excitement. If the cells and

fibres in the figure constituted the entire brain we might suppose

either a mechanical or a psychical reason. The mechanical reason might

lie in a general law that cells like S^b and M^b, whose excitement is

in a rising phase, are stronger drainers than cells like M^a, which

have just discharged; or it might lie in the fact that an irradiation

of the current beyond S^b into S^c and M^c has already begun also;

and in a still farther law that drainage tends in the direction of

the widest irradiations. Either of these suppositions would be a

sufficient mechanical reason why, having once said A, we should not

say it again. But we must not forget that the process has a psychical

side, nor close our eyes to the possibility that the _sort of feeling_

aroused by incipient currents may be the reason why certain of them are

instantly inhibited and others helped to flow. There is no doubt that

before we have uttered a single letter, the general intention to recite

the alphabet is already there; nor is there any doubt that to that

intention corresponds a widespread premonitory rising of tensions along

the entire system of cells and fibres which are later to be aroused.

So long as this rise of tensions _feels good_, so long every current

which increases it is furthered, and every current which diminishes it

is checked; and this may be the chief one of the 'existing conditions'

which make the drainage-channel from S^a to S^b temporarily so

strong.[511]

The new paths between the sensory cells of which we have studied the

formation are paths of 'association,' and we now see why associations

run always in the forward direction; why, for example, we cannot say

the alphabet backward, and why, although S^b discharges into S^c, there

is no tendency for S^c to discharge into S^b, or at least no more

than for it to discharge into S^a.[512] The first-formed paths had,

according to the principles which we invoked, to run from cells that

had just discharged to those that were discharging; and now, to get

currents to run the other way, we must go through a new learning of

our letters with their order reversed. There will _then_ be two sets

of association-pathways, either of them possible, between the sensible

cells. I represent them in Fig. 91, leaving out the motor features

for simplicity's sake. The dotted lines are the paths in the backward

direction, newly organized from the reception by the ear of the letters

in the order C B A.

[Illustration: FIG. 91.]

The same principles will explain the formation of new paths

successively concatenated to no matter how great an extent, but it

would obviously be folly to pretend to illustrate by more intricate

examples. I will therefore only bring back the case of the child and

flame (Vol. I. p. 25), to show how easily it admits of explanation as a

'purely cortical transaction' (_ibid._ p. 80). The sight of the flame

stimulates the cortical centre S^1 which discharges by an instinctive

reflex path into the centre M^1 for the grasping-movement. This

movement produces the feeling of burn, as its effects come back to the

centre S^2; and this centre by a second connate path discharges into

M^2, the centre for withdrawing the hand. The movement of withdrawal

stimulates the centre S^3, and this, as far as we are concerned, is

the last thing that happens. Now the next time the child sees the

candle, the cortex is in possession of the secondary paths which the

first experience left behind. S^2, having been stimulated immediately

after S^1, drained the latter, and now S^1 discharges into S^2 before

the discharge of M^1 has had time to occur; in other words, the sight

of the flame suggests the idea of the burn before it produces its own

natural reflex effects. The result is an inhibition of M^1, or an

overtaking of it before it is completed, by M^2.--The characteristic

physiological feature in all these acquired systems of paths lies in

the fact that the new-formed sensory irradiations keep _draining things

forward_, and so breaking up the 'motor circles' which would otherwise

accrue. But, even apart from catalepsy, we see the 'motor circle'

every now and then come back. An infant learning to execute a simple

movement at will, without regard to other movements beyond it, keeps

repeating it till tired. How reiteratively they babble each new-learned

word! And we adults often catch ourselves reiterating some meaningless

word over and over again, if by chance we once begin to utter it

'absent-mindedly,' that is, without thinking of any ulterior train of

words to which it may belong.

[Illustration: FIG. 92.]

* * * * *

One more observation before closing these already too protracted

physiological speculations. Already (Vol. I. p. 71) I have tried to

shadow forth a reason why collateral innervation should establish

itself after loss of brain-tissue, and why incoming stimuli should find

their way out again, after an interval, by their former paths. I can

now explain this a little better. Let S^1 be the dog's hearing-centre

when he receives the command 'Give your paw.' This _used_ to discharge

into the motor centre M^1, of whose discharge S^2 represents the

kinæsthetic effect; but now M^1 has been destroyed by an operation,

so that S^1 discharges as it can, into other movements of the body,

whimpering, raising the wrong paw, etc. The kinæsthetic centre S^2

meanwhile has been awakened by the order S^1, and the poor animal's

mind tingles with expectation and desire of certain incoming sensations

which are entirely at variance with those which the really executed

movements give. None of the latter sensations arouse a 'motor circle,'

for they are displeasing and inhibitory. But when, by random accident,

S^1 and S^2 _do_ discharge into a path leading through M^2, by which

the _paw is again given_, and S^2 is excited at last from without as

well as from within, there are no inhibitions and the 'motor circle' is

formed: S^1 discharges into M^2 over and over again, and the path from

the one spot to the other is so much deepened that at last it becomes

organized as the regular channel of efflux when S^1 is aroused. No

other path has a chance of being organized in like degree.

[Illustration: FIG. 93.]

* * * * *

[430] Parts of this chapter have appeared in an essay called "The

Feeling of Effort," published in the Anniversary Memoirs of the Boston

Society of Natural History, 1880; and parts in Scribner's Magazine for

Feb. 1888.

[431] I am abstracting at present for simplicity's sake, and so as to

keep to the elements of the matter, from the learning of acts by seeing

others do them.

[432] Deutsches Archiv f. Klin. Medicin, xxii. 321.

[433] Landry: Mémoire sur la Paralysie du Sens Musculaire, Gazette des

Hôpitaux, 1855, p. 270.

[434] Tàkacs: Ueber die Verspätung der Empfindungsleitung, Archiv für

Psychiatrie, Bd. x. Heft 3, p. 533. Concerning all such cases see the

remarks made above on pp. 205-6.

[435] Proceedings of American Soc. for Psychical Research, p. 95.

[436] In reality the movement cannot even be _started_ correctly in

some cases without the kinæsthetic impression. Thus Dr. Strümpell

relates how turning over the boy's hand made him bend the little

finger instead of the forefinger, when his eye was closed. "Ordered

to point, e.g., towards the left with his left arm, the arm was

usually raised straight forward, and then wandered about in groping

uncertainty, sometimes getting the right position and then leaving

it again. Similarly with the lower limbs. If the patient, lying

in bed, had, immediately after the tying of his eyes, to lay the

left leg over the right, it often happened that he moved it farther

over towards the left, and that it lay over the side of the bed in

apparently the most intolerably-uncomfortable position. The turning of

the head, too, from right to left, or towards certain objects known

to the patient, only ensued correctly when the patient, immediately

before his eye was bandaged, specially refreshed his perception as to

what the required movement was to be." In another anæsthetic of Dr.

Strümpell's (described in the same essay) the arm could not be moved

_at all_ unless the eyes were opened, however energetic the volition.

The variations in these hysteric cases are great. Some patients cannot

move the anæsthetic part _at all_ when the eyes are closed. Others

move it perfectly well, and can even write continuous sentences

with the anæsthetic hand. The causes of such differences are as yet

incompletely unexplored. M. Binet suggests (Revue Philosophique, xxv.

478) that in those who cannot move the hand at all the sensation of

light is required as a 'dynamogenic' agent (see above, p. 377);

and that in those who can move it skilfully the anæsthesia is only a

pseudo-insensibility and that the limb is in reality governed by a

dissociated or secondary consciousness. This latter explanation is

certainly correct. Professor G. E. Müller (Pflüger's Archiv, xlv. 90)

invokes the fact of individual differences of imagination to account

for the cases who cannot write at all. Their kinæsthetic images

properly so called may be weak, he says, and their optical images

insufficiently powerful to supplement them without a 'fillip' from

sensation. Janet's observation that hysteric anæsthesias may carry

amnesias with them would perfectly legitimate Müller's supposition.

What we now want is a minute examination of the individual cases.

Meanwhile Binet's article above referred to, and Bastian's paper in

Brain for April 1887, contain important discussions of the question. In

a later note I shall return to the subject again (see p. 520).

[437] Professor Beaunis found that the accuracy with which a certain

tenor sang was not lost when his vocal cords were made anæsthetic by

cocain. He concludes that the guiding sensations here are resident in

the laryngeal muscles themselves. They are much more probably in the

ear. (Beaunis, Les Sensations Internes (1889), p. 253).

[438] As the feeling of heat, for example, is the last psychic

antecedent of sweating, as the feeling of bright light is that of the

pupil's contraction, as the sight or smell of carrion is that of the

movements of disgust, as the remembrance of a blunder may be that of

a blush, so the idea of a movement's sensible effects might be that

of the movement itself. It is true that the idea of sweating will not

commonly make us sweat, nor that of blushing make us blush. But in

certain nauseated states the idea of vomiting will make us vomit; and

a kind of sequence which is in this case realized only exceptionally

might be the rule with the so-called voluntary muscles. It all

depends on the nervous connections between the centres of ideation

and the discharging paths. These may differ from one sort of centre

to another. They do differ somewhat from one individual to another.

Many persons never blush at the idea of their blunders, but only when

the actual blunder is committed; others blush at the idea; and some

do not blush at all. According to Lotze, with some persons "It is

possible to weep at will by trying to recall that peculiar feeling in

the trigeminal nerve which habitually precedes tears. Some can even

succeed in sweating voluntarily, by the lively recollection of the

characteristic skin-sensations, and the voluntary reproduction of an

indescribable sort of feeling of relaxation, which ordinarily precedes

the flow of perspiration." (Med. Psych., p. 303.) The commoner type

of exceptional case is that in which the idea of the _stimulus_, not

that of the effects, provokes the effects. Thus we read of persons who

contract their pupils at will by strongly imagining a brilliant light.

A gentleman once informed me (strangely enough I cannot recall who he

was, but I have an impression of his being a medical man) that he could

sweat at will by imagining himself on the brink of a precipice. The

sweating palms of fear are sometimes producible by imagining a terrible

object (cf. Manouvrier in Rev. Phil., xxii. 203). One of my students,

whose eyes were made to water by sitting in the dentist's chair before

a bright window, can now shed tears by imagining that situation again.

One might doubtless collect a large number of idiosyncratic cases of

this sort. They teach us how greatly the centres vary in their power to

discharge through certain channels. All that we need, now, to account

for the differences observed between the psychic antecedents of the

voluntary and involuntary movements is that centres producing ideas of

the movement's sensible effects should be able to instigate the former,

but be out of gear with the latter, unless in exceptional individuals.

The famous case of Col. Townsend, who could stop his heart at will, is

well known. See, on this whole matter, D. H. Tuke: Illustrations of

the Influence of the Mind on the Body, chap. xiv. § 3; also J. Braid:

Observations on Trance or Human Hybernation (1850). The latest reported

case of voluntary control of the heart is by Dr. S. A. Pease, in Boston

Medical and Surgical Journal, May 30, 1889.

[439] Prof. Harless, in an article which in many respects forestalls

what I have to say (Der Apparat des Willens, in Fichte's Zeitschrift

f. Philos., Bd. 38, 1861), uses the convenient word _Effectsbild_ to

designate these images.

[440] The best modern statement I know is by Jaccoud: Des Paraplégies

et de l'Ataxie du Mouvement (Paris, 1864), p. 591.

[441] Leidesdorf u. Meynert's Vierteljsch. f. Psychiatrie, Bd. i. Heft

i. S. 36-7 (1867). Physiologische Psychologie, 1st ed. S. 316.

[442] Professor Fouillée, who defends them in the Revue Philosophique,

xxviii, 561 ff., also admits (p. 574) that they are the same whatever

be the movement, and that all our discrimination of _which_ movement

we are innervating is afferent, consisting of sensations after, and of

sensory images before, the act.

[443] Cf. Souriau in Rev. Philosophique, xxii. 454.--Professor G. E.

Müller thus describes some of his experiments with weights: If, after

lifting a weight of 8000 grams a number of times we suddenly get a

weight of only 500 grams to lift, "this latter weight is then lifted

with a velocity which strikes every onlooker, so that the receptacle

for the weight with all its contents often flies high up as if it

carried the arm along with it, and the energy with which it is raised

is sometimes so entirely out of proportion to the weight itself, that

the contents of the receptacle are slung out upon the table in spite of

the mechanical obstacles which such a result has to overcome. A more

palpable proof that the trouble here is a wrong adaptation of the motor

impulse could not be given." Pflüger's Archiv, xlv. 47. Compare also p.

57, and the quotation from Hering on the same page.

[444] Archiv für Psychiatrie, iii. 618-635. Bernhardt strangely

enough seems to think that what his experiments disprove is the

existence of afferent muscular feelings, not those of efferent

innervation--apparently because he deems that the peculiar thrill of

the electricity ought to overpower all other afferent feelings from

the part. But it is far more natural to interpret his results the

other way, even aside from the certainty yielded by other evidence

that passive muscular feelings exist. This other evidence, after being

compendiously summed up by Sachs in Reichert und Du Bois' Archiv

(1874), pp. 174-188, is, as far as the anatomical and physiological

grounds go, again thrown into doubt by Mays, Zeitschrift f. Biologie,

Bd. xx.

[445] Functions of the Brain, p. 228.

[446] Vorlesungen über Menschen und Thierseele, i. 222.

[447] In some instances we get an opposite result. Dr. H. Charlton

Bastian (British Medical Journal (1869), p. 461, note), says:

"Ask a man whose lower extremities are completely paralyzed, whether,

when he ineffectually wills to move either of these limbs, he is

conscious of an expenditure of energy in any degree proportionate to

that which he would have experienced if his muscles had naturally

responded to his volition. He will tell us rather that he has a sense

only of his utter powerlessness, and that his volition is a mere mental

act, carrying with it no feelings of expended energy such as he is

accustomed to experience when his muscles are in powerful action, and

from which action and its consequences alone, as I think, he can derive

any adequate notion of resistance."

[448] Münsterberg's words may be added: "In lifting an object in the

hand I can discover no sensation of volitional energy. I perceive in

the first place a slight tension about the head, but that this results

from a contraction in the head muscles, and not from a feeling of the

brain-discharge, is shown by the simple fact that I get the tension

on the right side of the head when I move the right arm, whereas the

motor discharge takes place in the opposite side of the brain.... In

maximal contractions of body- and limb-muscles there occur, as if it

were to reinforce them, those special contractions of the muscles of

the face [especially frowning and clinching teeth] and those tensions

of the skin of the head. These sympathetic movements, felt particularly

on the side which makes the effort, are perhaps the immediate ground

why we ascribe our awareness of maximal contraction to the region

of the head, and call it a consciousness of force, instead of a

peripheral sensation." (Die Willenshandlung (1888), pp. 73, 82.) Herr

Münsterberg's work is a little masterpiece, which appeared after my

text was written. I shall have repeatedly to refer to it again, and

cordially recommend to the reader its most thorough refutation of the

Innervationsgefühl-theory.

[449] Physiologische Optik, p. 600.

[450] [The left and sound eye is here supposed covered. If both eyes

look at the same field there are double images which still more perplex

the judgment. The patient, however, learns to see correctly before many

days or weeks are over.--W. J.]

[451] Alfred Graefe, in Handbuch der gesammten Augenheilkunde, Bd. vi.

pp. 18-21.

[452] Professor G. E. Müller (Zur Grundlegung der Psychophysik (1878),

p. 318,) was the first to explain the phenomenon after the manner

advocated in the text. Still unacquainted with his book, I published my

own similar explanation two years later.

Professor Mach in his wonderfully original little work 'Beiträge

zur Analyse der Empfindungen,' p. 57, describes an artificial way of

getting translocation, and explains the effect likewise by the feeling

of innervation. "Turn your eyes," he says, "as far as possible towards

the left and press against the right sides of the orbits two large

lumps of putty. If you then try to look as quickly as possible towards

the right, this succeeds, on account of the incompletely spherical

form of the eyes, only imperfectly, and the objects consequently

appear translocated very considerably towards the right. The _bare

will_ to look rightwards gives to all images on the retina a greater

_rightwards value_, to express it shortly. The experiment is at first

surprising."--I regret to say that I cannot myself make it succeed--I

know not for what reason. But even where it does succeed it seems to

me that the conditions are much too complicated for Professor Mach's

theoretic conclusions to be safely drawn. The putty squeezed into the

orbit, and the pressure of the eyeball against it must give rise to

peripheral sensations _strong_ enough, at any rate (if only of the

right kind), to justify any amount of false perception of our eyeball's

position, quite apart from the innervation feelings which Professor

Mach supposes to coexist.

[453] An illusion in principle exactly analogous to that of the patient

under discussion can be produced experimentally in anyone in a way

which Hering has described in his Lehre von Binocularen Sehen, pp.

13-14. I will quote Helmholtz's account of it, which is especially

valuable as coming from a believer in the _Innervationsgefühl_: "Let

the two eyes first look parallel, then let the right eye be closed

whilst the left still looks at the infinitely distant object _a_. The

directions of both eyes will thus remain unaltered, and _a_ will be

seen in its right place. Now accommodate the left eye for a point _f_

[a needle in Hering's experiment] lying on the optical axis between it

and _a_, only very near. The position of the left eye and its optical

axis, as well as the place of the retinal image upon it... are wholly

unaltered by this movement. But the consequence is that an apparent

movement of the object occurs--a movement towards the left. As soon

as we accommodate again for distance the object returns to its old

place. Now what alters itself in this experiment is only the position

of the closed right eye: its optical axis, when the effort is made to

accommodate for the point _f_, also converges towards this point....

Conversely it is possible for me to make my optical axes diverge, even

with closed eyes, so that in the above experiment the right eye should

turn far to the right of _a_. This divergence is but slowly reached,

and gives me therefore no illusory movement. But when I suddenly relax

my effort to make it, and the right optical axis springs back to the

parallel position, I immediately see the object which the left eye

fixates shift its position towards the left. Thus not only the position

of the seeing eye _a_, but also that of the closed eye _b_, influences

our judgment of the direction in which the seen object lies. The open

eye remaining fixed, and the closed eye moving towards the right or

left, the object seen by the open eye appears also to move towards the

right or left" (Physiol. Optik, pp. 607-8.)

[454] Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, p. 65.

[455] P. 68.

[456] I owe the interpretation in the text to my friend and former

student, Mr. E. S. Drown, whom I set to observe the phenomenon

before I had observed it myself. Concerning the vacillations in our

interpretation of relative motion over retina and skin, see above, p.

173.

Herr Münsterberg gives additional reasons against the feeling of

innervation, of which I will quote a couple. First, our ideas of

movement are all _faint_ ideas, resembling in this the copies of

sensations in memory. Were they feelings of the outgoing discharge,

they would be original states of consciousness, not copies; and ought

by analogy to be _vivid_ like other original states.--Second, our

unstriped muscles yield no feelings in contracting, nor can they be

contracted at will, differing thus in _two_ peculiarities from the

voluntary muscles. What more natural than to suppose that the two

peculiarities hang together, and that the reason why we cannot contract

our intestines, for example, at will, is, that we have no memory-images

of how their contraction feels? Were the supposed innervation-feeling

always the 'mental cue,' one doesn't see why we might not have it even

where, as here, the contractions themselves are unfelt, and why it

might not bring the contractions about. (Die Willenshandlung, pp 87-8.)

[457] Revue Philosophique, xxiii. 442.

[458] _Ibid._ xx. 604.

[459] Herr Sternberg (Pflüger's Archiv, xxxvii. p. 1) thinks that he

proves the feeling of innervation by the fact that when we have willed

to make a movement we generally think that it is made. We have already

seen some of the facts on pp. 105-6, above. S. cites from Exner the

fact that if we put a piece of hard rubber between our back teeth and

bite, our front teeth seem actually to approach each other, although it

is physically impossible for them to do so. He proposes the following

experiment: Lay the palm of the hand on a table with the forefinger

overlapping its edge and flexed back as far as possible, whilst the

table keeps the other fingers extended; then try to flex the terminal

joint of the forefinger without looking. You do not do it, and yet

you think that you do. Here again the innervation, according to the

author, is felt as an executed movement. It seems to me, as I said in

the previous place, that the illusion is in all these cases due to

the inveterate association of ideas. Normally our will to move has

always been followed by the sensation that we _have_ moved, except when

the simultaneous sensation of an external resistance was there. The

result is that where we feel no external resistance, and the muscles

and tendons tighten, the invariably associated idea is intense enough

to be hallucinatory. In the experiment with the teeth, the resistance

customarily met with when our masseters contract is a soft one. We

do not close our teeth on a thing like hard rubber once in a million

times; so when we do so, we imagine the habitual result.--Persons with

_amputated limbs_ more often than not continue to feel them as if they

were still there, and can, moreover, give themselves the feeling of

moving them at will. The life-long sensorial associate of the idea of

'working one's toes,' e.g. (uncorrected by any opposite sensation,

since no real sensation of non-movement can come from non-existing

toes), follows the idea and swallows it up. The man thinks that his

toes are 'working' (cf. Proceedings of American Soc. for Psych.

Research, p. 249).

Herr Loeb also comes to the rescue of the feeling of innervation

with observations of his own made after my text was written, but

they convince me no more than the arguments of others. Loeb's facts

are these (Pflüger's Archiv, xliv. p. 1): If we stand before a

vertical surface, and if, with our hands _at different heights_, we

_simultaneously_ make with them what seem to us equally extensive

movements, that movement always turns out really shorter which is

made with the arm whose muscles (in virtue of the arm's position) are

already the more contracted. The same result ensues when the arms

are laterally unsymmetrical. Loeb assumes that both arms contract by

virtue of a common innervation, but that although this innervation is

relatively less effective upon the more contracted arm, our _feeling_

of its equal strength overpowers the disparity of the incoming

sensations of movement which the two limbs send back, and makes us

think that the spaces they traverse are the same. "The sensation of the

extent and direction of our voluntary movements depends accordingly

upon the impulse of our will to move, and not upon the feelings set up

by the motion in the active organ." Now if this is the elementary law

which Loeb calls it, why does it only manifest its effect when both

hands are moving simultaneously? Why not when the _same_ hand makes

_successive_ movements? and especially why not when both hands move

symmetrically or at the same level, but _one of them_ is _weighted_? A

weighted hand surely requires a stronger innervation than an unweighted

one to move an equal distance upwards; and yet, as Loeb confesses, we

do not tend to overestimate the path which it traverses under these

circumstances. The fact is that the illusion which Loeb has studied

is a complex resultant of many factors. One of them, it seems to me,

is an instinctive tendency to _revert to the type of the bilateral

movements of childhood_. In adult life we move our arms for the most

part in alternation; but in infancy the free movements of the arms are

almost always similar on both sides, symmetrical when the direction

of motion is horizontal, and with the hands on the same level when

it is vertical. The most natural innervation, when the movements are

rapidly performed, is one which takes the movement hack to this form.

Our _estimation_ meanwhile of the lengths severally traversed by the

two hands is mainly based, as such estimations with closed eyes usually

are (see Loeb's own earlier paper, _Untersuchungen über den Fühlraum

der Hand_, in Pflüger's Archiv, xli. 107), upon the apparent velocity

and duration of the movement. The duration is the same for both hands,

since the movements begin and end simultaneously. The velocities of

the two hands are under the experimental conditions almost impossible

of comparison. It is well known how imperfect a discrimination of

_weights_ we have when we 'heft' them simultaneously, one in either

hand; and G. E. Müller has well shown (Pflüger's Archiv, xlv. 57) that

the velocity of the lift is the main factor in determining our judgment

of weight. It is hardly possible to conceive of more unfavorable

conditions for making an accurate comparison of the length of two

movements than those which govern the experiments which are under

discussion. The only prominent sign is the duration, which would lead

us to infer the equality of the two movements. We consequently deem

them equal, though a native tendency in our motor centres keeps them

from being so.

[460] This is by no means an unplausible opinion. See Vol. I. p. 65.

[461] Maine de Biran, Royer Collard, Sir John Herschel, Dr. Carpenter,

Dr. Martineau, all seem to posit a force-sense by which, in becoming

aware of an outer resistance to our will, we are taught the existence

of an outer world. I hold that every peripheral sensation gives us

an outer world. An insect crawling on our skin gives us as 'outward'

an impression as a hundred pounds weighing on our back.--I have read

M. A. Bertrand's criticism of my views (La Psychologie de l'Effort,

1889); but as he seems to think that I deny the _feeling_ of effort

altogether, I can get no profit from it, despite his charming way of

saying things.

[462] Bowditch and Southard in Journal of Physiology, vol. iii. No.

3. It was found in these experiments that the maximum of accuracy was

reached when two seconds of time elapsed between locating the object

by eye or hand and starting to touch it. When the mark was located

with one hand, and the other hand had to touch it, the error was

considerably greater than when the same hand both located and touched

it.

[463] The same caution must be shown in discussing pathological cases.

There are remarkable discrepancies in the effects of peripheral

anæsthesia upon the voluntary power. Such cases as I quoted in the

text (p. 490) are by no means the only type. In those cases the

patients could move their limbs accurately when the eyes were open,

and inaccurately when they were shut. In other cases, however, the

anæsthetic patients _cannot move their limbs at all_ when the eyes are

shut. (For reports of two such cases see Bastian in 'Brain,' Binet in

Rev. Philos., xxv. 478.) M. Binet explains these (hysterical) cases as

requiring the 'dynamogenic' stimulus of light (see above, p. 377).

They _might_, however, be cases of such congenitally defective optical

imagination that the 'mental cue' was normally 'tactile;' and that when

this tactile cue failed through functional inertness of the kinæsthetic

centres, the only optical cue strong enough to determine the discharge

had to be an actual _sensation_ of the eye.--There is still a third

class of cases in which the limbs have lost all sensibility, even for

movements passively imprinted, but in which voluntary movements can

be accurately executed even when the eyes are closed. MM. Binet and

Féré have reported some of these interesting cases, which are found

amongst the hysterical hemianæsthetics. They can, for example, write

accurately at will, although their eyes are closed and they have no

feeling of the writing taking place, and many of them do not know

when it begins or stops. Asked to write repeatedly the letter _a_,

and then say how many times they have written it, some are able to

assign the number and some are not. Some of them admit that they are

guided by visual imagination of what is being done. Cf. Archives de

Physiologie, Oct. 1887, pp. 363-5. Now it would seem at first sight

that feelings of outgoing innervation must exist in these cases and

be kept account of. There are no other guiding impressions, either

immediate or remote, of which the patient is conscious; and unless

feelings of innervation be there, the writing would seem miraculous.

But if such feelings are present in these cases, and suffice to direct

accurately the succession of movements, why do they not suffice in

those other anæsthetic cases in which movement becomes disorderly

when the eyes are closed? _Innervation_ is there, or there would be

no movement; why is the _feeling_ of the innervation gone? The truth

seems to be, as M. Binet supposes (Rev. Philos., xxiii. p. 479), that

these cases are not arguments for the feeling of innervation. They are

pathological curiosities; and the patients are not really anæsthetic,

but are victims of that curious dissociation or splitting-off of one

part of their consciousness from the rest which we are just beginning

to understand, thanks to Messrs. Janet, Binet, and Gurney, and in

which the split-off part (in this case the kinæsthetic sensations) may

nevertheless remain to produce its usual effects. Compare what was said

above, p. 491.

[464] Medicinische Psychologie, p. 293. In his admirably acute chapter

on the Will this author has most explicitly maintained the position

that what we call muscular exertion is an afferent and not an efferent

feeling; "We must affirm universally that in the muscular feeling we

are not sensible of _the force_ on its way to produce an effect, but

only of the _sufferance_ already produced in our movable organs, the

muscles, after the force has, in a manner unobservable by us, exerted

upon them its causality" (p. 311). How often the battles of psychology

have to be fought over again, each time with heavier armies and bigger

trains, though not always with such able generals!

[465] Ch. Féré: Sensation et Mouvement (1887), chapter iii.

[466] Professor A. Bain (Senses and Intellect, pp 336-48) and Dr. W. B.

Carpenter (Mental Physiology, chap. vi) give examples in abundance.

[467] For a full account, by an expert, of the 'willing-game,' see

Mr. Stuart Cumberland's article: A Thought-reader's Experiences in

the Nineteenth century, xx. 867. M. Gley has given a good example

of ideo-motor action in the Bulletins de la Société de Psychologie

Physiologique for 1889. Tell a person to think intently of a certain

name, and saying that you will then force her to write it, let her hold

a pencil, and do you yourself hold her hand. She will then probably

trace the name involuntarily, believing that you are forcing her to do

it.

[468] I abstract here from the fact that a certain _intensity_ of

the consciousness is required for its impulsiveness to be effective

in a complete degree. There is an inertia in the motor processes as

in all other natural things. In certain individuals, and at certain

times (disease, fatigue), the inertia is unusually great, and we

may then have ideas of action which produce no visible act, but

discharge themselves into merely nascent dispositions to activity or

into emotional expression. The inertia of the motor parts here plays

the same rôle as is elsewhere played by antagonistic ideas. We shall

consider this restrictive inertia later on, it obviously introduces no

essential alteration into the law which the text lays down.

[469] I use the common phraseology here for mere convenience' sake.

The reader who has made himself acquainted with Chapter IX will always

understand, when he hears of many ideas simultaneously present to the

mind and acting upon each other, that what is really meant is a mind

with one idea before it, of many objects, purposes, reasons, motives,

related to each other, some in a harmonious and some in an antagonistic

way. With this caution I shall not hesitate from time to time to fall

into the popular Lockian speech, erroneous though I believe it to be.

[470] My attention was first emphatically called to this class of

decisions by my colleague, Professor C. C. Everett.

[471] In an excellent article on The 'Mental Qualities of an Athlete'

in the Harvard Monthly, vol. vi. p. 43, Mr. A. T. Dudley assigns the

first place to the rapidly impulsive temperament. "Ask him how, in some

complex trick, he performed a certain act, why he pushed or pulled at

a certain instant, and he will tell you he does not know; he did it by

instinct; or rather his nerves and muscles did it of themselves....

Here is the distinguishing feature of the good player: the good player,

confident in his training and his practice, in the critical game trusts

entirely to his impulse, and does not think out every move. The poor

player, unable to trust his impulsive actions, is compelled to think

carefully all the time. He thus not only loses the opportunities

through his slowness in comprehending the whole situation, but, being

compelled to think rapidly all the time, at critical points becomes

confused; while the first-rate player, not trying to reason, but acting

as impulse directs, is continually distinguishing himself and plays the

better under the greater pressure."

[472] T. B. Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases (London

1883), pp. 310-318.

[473] In his Maladies de la Volonté, p. 77.

[474] For other cases of 'impulsive insanity,' see H. Maudsley's

Responsibility in Mental Disease, pp. 133-170, and Forbes Winslow's

Obscure Diseases of the Mind and Brain, chapters vi, vii, viii.

[475] Quoted by G. Burr, in an article on the Insanity of Inebriety in

the N. Y. Psychological and Medico-Legal Journal, Dec. 1874.

[476] Autobiography, Howells' edition (1877), pp. 192-6.

[477] See a paper on Insistent and Fixed Ideas by Dr. Cowles in

American Journal of Psychology, i. 222; and another on the so-called

Insanity of Doubt by Dr. Knapp, _ibid._ iii. 1. The latter contains a

partial bibliography of the subject.

[478] Quoted by Ribot, _op cit._ p. 39.

[479] The silliness of the old-fashioned pleasure-philosophy _saute aux

yeux_. Take, for example, Prof. Bain's explanation of sociability and

parental love by the pleasures of touch: "Touch is the fundamental and

generic sense.... Even after the remaining senses are differentiated,

the primary sense continues to be a leading susceptibility of the mind.

The soft warm touch, if not a first-class influence, is at least an

approach to that. The combined power of soft contact and warmth amounts

to a considerable pitch of massive pleasure; while there may be subtle

influences not reducible to these two heads, such as we term, from

not knowing anything about them, magnetic or electric. The sort of

thrill from taking a baby in arms is something beyond mere warm touch;

and it may rise to the ecstatic height, in which case, however, there

may be concurrent sensations and ideas.... In mere tender emotion not

sexual, there is nothing but the sense of touch to gratify, unless we

assume the occult magnetic influences.... In a word, our love pleasures

begin and end in sensual contact. Touch is both the alpha and omega

of affection. As the terminal and satisfying sensation, the _ne plus

ultra_, it must be a pleasure of the highest degree.... Why should

a more lively feeling grow up towards a fellow-being than towards a

perennial fountain? [This 'should' is simply delicious from the more

modern evolutionary point of view.] It must be that there is a source

of pleasure in the companionship of other sentient creatures, over

and above the help afforded by them in obtaining the necessaries of

life. To account for this, I can suggest nothing but the primary and

independent pleasure of the animal embrace." [Mind, this is said not of

the sexual interest, but of 'Sociability at Large.'] "For this pleasure

every creature is disposed to pay something, even when it is only

fraternal. A certain amount of material benefit imparted is a condition

of the full heartiness of a responding embrace, the complete fruition

of this primitive joy. In the absence of those conditions the pleasure

of giving ... can scarcely be accounted for; we know full well that,

without these helps, it would be a very meagre sentiment in beings

like ourselves.... It seems to me that there must be at the [parental

instinct's] foundation that intense pleasure in the embrace of the

young which we find to characterize the parental feeling throughout.

Such a pleasure once created would associate itself with the prevailing

features and aspects of the young, and give to all of these their very

great interest. For the sake of the pleasure, the parent discovers the

necessity of nourishing the subject of it, and comes to regard the

ministering function as a part or condition of the delight" (Emotions

and Will, pp. 126, 127, 132, 133, 140). Prof. Bain does not explain why

a satin cushion kept at about 98º F. would not on the whole give us the

pleasure in question more cheaply than our friends and babies do. It

is true that the cushion might lack the 'occult magnetic influences.'

Most of us would say that neither a baby's nor a friend's skin would

possess them, were not a tenderness already there. The youth who feels

ecstasy shoot through him when by accident the silken palm or even the

'vesture's hem' of his idol touches him, would hardly feel it were he

not hard hit by Cupid in advance. The love creates the ecstasy, not the

ecstasy the love. And for the rest of us can it possibly be that all

our social virtue springs from an appetite for the sensual pleasure of

having our hand shaken, or being slapped on the back?

[480] Emotion and Will, p. 352. But even Bain's own description belies

his formula, for the idea appears as the 'moving' and the pleasure as

the 'directing' force.

[481] P. 398.

[482] P. 354.

[483] P. 355.

[484] P. 390.

[485] Pp. 295-6.

[486] P. 121.

[487] Cf. also Bain's note to Jas. Mill's Analysis, vol. ii. p. 305.

[488] How much clearer Hume's head was than that of his disciples! "It

has been proved beyond all controversy that even the passions commonly

esteemed selfish carry the Mind beyond self directly to the object;

that though the satisfaction of these passions gives us enjoyment, yet

the prospect of this enjoyment is not the cause of the passions but, on

the contrary, the passion is antecedent to the enjoyment, and without

the former the latter could never possibly exist," etc. (Essay on the

Different Species of Philosophy, § 1, note near the end.)

[489] In favor of the view in the text, one may consult H. Sidgwick,

Methods of Ethics, book i. chap. iv; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to

Ethics, bk. iii. chap. i. p. 179; Carpenter, Mental Physiol., chap vi;

J. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, part ii, bk. i, chap. ii. i,

and bk. ii, branch i. chap. i. i. § 3. Against it see Leslie Stephen,

Science of Ethics, chap. ii. § ii; H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, §§ 9-15;

D. G. Thompson, System of Psychology, part ix, and Mind, vi. 62. Also

Bain, Senses and Intellect, 738-44; Emotions and Will, 436.

[490] This sentence is written from the author's own consciousness. But

many persons say that where they disbelieve in the effects ensuing,

as in the case of the table, they cannot will it. They "cannot exert

a volition that a table should move." This personal difference may be

partly verbal. Different people may attach different connotations to

the word 'will.' But I incline to think that we differ psychologically

as well. When one knows that he has no power, one's desire of a thing

is called a _wish_ and not a will. The sense of impotence inhibits the

volition. Only by abstracting from the thought of the impossibility

am I able to imagine strongly the table sliding over the floor, to

make the bodily 'effort' which I do, and to will it to come towards

me. It may be that some people are unable to perform this abstraction,

and that the image of the table stationary on the floor inhibits the

contradictory image of its moving, which is the object to be willed.

[491] A normal palsy occurs during sleep. We will all sorts of motions

in our dreams, but seldom perform any of them. In nightmare we become

conscious of the non-performance, and make a muscular 'effort.' This

seems then to occur in a restricted way, limiting itself to the

occlusion of the glottis and producing the respiratory anxiety which

wakes us up.

[492] Both resolves and beliefs have of course immediate motor

consequences of a quasi-emotional sort, changes of breathing, of

attitude, internal speech movements, etc.; but these movements are not

the _objects_ resolved on or believed. The movements in common volition

are the objects willed.

[493] This _volitional_ effort pure and simple must be carefully

distinguished from the _muscular_ effort with which it is usually

confounded. The latter consists of all those peripheral feelings to

which a muscular 'exertion' may give rise. These feelings, whenever

they are massive and the body is not 'fresh,' are rather disagreeable,

especially when accompanied by stopped breath, congested head, bruised

skin of fingers, toes, or shoulders, and strained joints. And it is

only _as thus disagreeable_ that the mind must make its _volitional_

effort in stably representing their reality and consequently bringing

it about. That they happen to be made real by muscular activity is a

purely accidental circumstance. A soldier standing still to be fired

at expects disagreeable sensations from his muscular passivity. The

action of his will, in sustaining the expectation, is identical with

that required for a painful muscular effort. What is hard for both _is

facing an idea as real_.

Where much muscular effort is not needed or where the 'freshness' is

very great, the volitional effort is not required to sustain the idea

of movement, which comes then and stays in virtue of association's

simpler laws. More commonly, however, muscular effort involves

volitional effort as well. Exhausted with fatigue and wet and watching,

the sailor on a wreck throws himself down to rest. But hardly are his

limbs fairly relaxed, when the order 'To the pumps!' again sounds

in his ears. Shall he, can he, obey it? Is it not better just to let

his aching body lie, and let the ship go down if she will? So he lies

on, till, with a desperate heave of the will, at last he staggers to

his legs, and to his task again. Again, there are instances where the

fiat demands great volitional effort though the muscular exertion be

insignificant, e.g., the getting out of bed and bathing one's self on a

cold morning.

[494] Cf. Aristotle's Nichomachæan Ethics, vii. 3; also a discussion of

the doctrine of 'The Practical Syllogism' in Sir A. Grant's edition of

this work, 2d ed. vol. i. p. 212 ff.

[495] The Duality of the Mind, pp. 141-2. Another case from the

same book (p. 123): "A gentleman of respectable birth, excellent

education, and ample fortune, engaged in one of the highest departments

of trade,... and being induced to embark in one of the plausible

speculations of the day ... was utterly ruined. Like other men he could

bear a sudden overwhelming reverse better than a long succession of

petty misfortunes, and the way in which he conducted himself on the

occasion met with unbounded admiration from his friends. He withdrew,

however, into rigid seclusion, and being no longer able to exercise

the generosity and indulge the benevolent feelings which had formed

the happiness of his life, made himself a substitute for them by

daydreams, gradually fell into a state of irritable despondency, from

which he only gradually recovered with the loss of reason. He now

fancied himself possessed of immense wealth, and gave without stint

his imaginary riches. He has ever since been under gentle restraint,

and leads a life not merely of happiness, but of bliss; converses

rationally, reads the newspapers, where every tale of distress attracts

his notice, and being furnished with an abundant supply of blank

checks, he fills up one of them with a munificent sum, sends it off to

the sufferer, and sits down to his dinner with a happy conviction that

he has earned the right to a little indulgence in the pleasures of the

table; and yet, on a serious conversation with one of his old friends,

he is quite conscious of his real position, but the conviction is so

exquisitely painful that _he will not let himself believe it_."

[496] 'Le Sentiment de l'Effort, et la Conscience de l'Action,' in

Revue Philosophique, xxviii. 561.

[497] P. 577.

[498] They will be found indicated, in somewhat popular form, in a

lecture on 'The Dilemma of Determinism,' published in the Unitarian

Review (of Boston) for September 1884 (vol. xxii. p. 193).