CHAPTER XXVI.

WILL.

=Voluntary Acts.=--Desire, wish, will, are states of mind which everyone

knows, and which no definition can make plainer. We desire to feel, to

have, to do, all sorts of things which at the moment are not felt, had,

or done. If with the desire there goes a sense that attainment is not

possible, we simply _wish_; but if we believe that the end is in our

power, we _will_ that the desired feeling, having, or doing shall be

real; and real it presently becomes, either immediately upon the willing

or after certain preliminaries have been fulfilled.

The only ends which follow _immediately_ upon our willing seem to be

movements of our own bodies. Whatever _feelings_ and _havings_ we may

will to get come in as results of preliminary movements which we make

for the purpose. This fact is too familiar to need illustration; so that

we may start with the proposition that the only _direct_ outward effects

of our will are bodily movements. The mechanism of production of these

voluntary movements is what befalls us to study now.

=They are secondary performances.= The movements we have studied hitherto

have been automatic and reflex, and (on the first occasion of their

performance, at any rate) unforeseen by the agent. The movements to the

study of which we now address ourselves, being desired and intended

beforehand, are of course done with full prevision of what they are to

be. It follows from this that _voluntary movements must be secondary,

not primary, functions of our organism_. This is the first point to

understand in the psychology of Volition. Reflex, instinctive, and

emotional movements are all primary performances. The nerve-centres are

so organized that certain stimuli pull the trigger of certain explosive

parts; and a creature going through one of these explosions for the

first time undergoes an entirely novel experience. The other day I was

standing at a railroad station with a little child, when an

express-train went thundering by. The child, who was near the edge of

the platform, started, winked, had his breathing convulsed, turned pale,

burst out crying, and ran frantically towards me and hid his face. I

have no doubt that this youngster was almost as much astonished by his

own behavior as he was by the train, and more than I was, who stood by.

Of course if such a reaction has many times occurred we learn what to

expect of ourselves, and can then foresee our conduct, even though it

remain as involuntary and uncontrollable as it was before. But if, in

voluntary action properly so called, the act must be foreseen, it

follows that no creature not endowed with prophetic power can perform an

act voluntarily for the first time. Well, we are no more endowed with

prophetic vision of what movements lie in our power than we are endowed

with prophetic vision of what sensations we are capable of receiving. As

we must wait for the sensations to be given us, so we must wait for the

movements to be performed involuntarily, before we can frame ideas of

what either of these things are. We learn all our possibilities by the

way of experience. When a particular movement, having once occurred in a

random, reflex, or involuntary way, has left an image of itself in the

memory, then the movement can be desired again, and deliberately willed.

But it is impossible to see how it could be willed before.

_A supply of ideas of the various movements that are possible, left in

the memory by experiences of their involuntary performance, is thus the

first prerequisite of the voluntary life._

=Two Kinds of Ideas of Movement.=--Now these ideas may be either

_resident_ or _remote_. That is, they may be of the movement as it

feels, when taking place, in the moving parts; or they may be of the

movement as it feels in some other part of the body which it affects

(strokes, presses, scratches, etc.), or as it sounds, or as it looks.

The resident sensations in the parts that move have been called

_kinæsthetic_ feelings, the memories of them are kinæsthetic ideas. It

is by these kinæsthetic sensations that we are made conscious of

_passive movements_--movements communicated to our limbs by others. If

you lie with closed eyes, and another person noiselessly places your arm

or leg in any arbitrarily chosen attitude, you receive a feeling of what

attitude it is, and can reproduce it yourself in the arm or leg of the

opposite side. Similarly a man waked suddenly from sleep in the dark is

aware of how he finds himself lying. At least this is what happens in

normal cases. But when the feelings of passive movement as well as all

the other feelings of a limb are lost, we get such results as are given

in the following account by Prof. A. Strümpell of his wonderful

anæsthetic boy, whose only sources of feeling were the right eye and the

left ear:[53]

"Passive movements could be imprinted on all the extremities to the

greatest extent, without attracting the patient's notice. Only in

violent forced hyperextension of the joints, especially of the knees,

there arose a dull vague feeling of strain, but this was seldom

precisely localized. We have often, after bandaging the eyes of the

patient, carried him about the room, laid him on a table, given to his

arms and legs the most fantastic and apparently the most inconvenient

attitudes without his having a suspicion of it. The expression of

astonishment in his face, when all at once the removal of the

handkerchief revealed his situation, is indescribable in words. Only

when his head was made to hang away down he immediately spoke of

dizziness, but could not assign its ground. Later he sometimes inferred

from the sounds connected with the manipulation that something special

was being done with him.... He had no feelings of muscular fatigue. If,

with his eyes shut, we told him to raise his arm and to keep it up, he

did so without trouble. After one or two minutes, however, the arm began

to tremble and sink without his being aware of it. He asserted still his

ability to keep it up.... Passively holding still his fingers did not

affect him. He thought constantly that he opened and shut his hand,

whereas it was really fixed."

_No third kind of idea is called for._ We need, then, when we perform a

movement, either a kinæsthetic or a remote idea of which special

movement it is to be. In addition to this it has often been supposed

that we need an _idea of the amount of innervation_ required for the

muscular contraction. The discharge from the motor centre into the motor

nerve is supposed to give a sensation _sui generis_, opposed to all our

other sensations. These accompany incoming currents, whilst that, it is

said, accompanies an outgoing current, and no movement is supposed to be

totally defined in our mind, unless an anticipation of this feeling

enter into our idea. The movement's degree of strength, and the effort

required to perform it, are supposed to be specially revealed by the

feeling of innervation. Many authors deny that this feeling exists, and

the proofs given of its existence are certainly insufficient.

The various degrees of 'effort' actually felt in making the same

movement against different resistances are all accounted for by the

incoming feelings from our chest, jaws, abdomen, and other parts

sympathetically contracted whenever the effort is great. There is no

need of a consciousness of the amount of outgoing current required. If

anything be obvious to introspection, it is that the degree of strength

put forth is completely revealed to us by incoming feelings from the

muscles themselves and their insertions, from the vicinity of the

joints, and from the general fixation of the larynx, chest, face, and

body. When a certain degree of energy of contraction rather than

another is thought of by us, this complex aggregate of afferent

feelings, forming the material of our thought, renders absolutely

precise and distinctive our mental image of the exact strength of

movement to be made, and the exact amount of resistance to be overcome.

Let the reader try to direct his will towards a particular movement, and

then notice what _constituted_ the direction of the will. Was it

anything over and above the notion of the different feelings to which

the movement when effected would give rise? If we abstract from these

feelings, will any sign, principle, or means of orientation be left by

which the will may innervate the proper muscles with the right

intensity, and not go astray into the wrong ones? Strip off these images

anticipative of the results of the motion, and so far from leaving us

with a complete assortment of directions into which our will may launch

itself, you leave our consciousness in an absolute and total vacuum. If

I will to write _Peter_ rather than _Paul_, it is the thought of certain

digital sensations, of certain alphabetic sounds, of certain appearances

on the paper, and of no others, which immediately precedes the motion of

my pen. If I will to utter the word _Paul_ rather than _Peter_, it is

the thought of my voice falling on my ear, and of certain muscular

feelings in my tongue, lips, and larynx, which guide the utterance. All

these are incoming feelings, and between the thought of them, by which

the act is mentally specified with all possible completeness, and the

act itself, there is no room for any third order of mental phenomenon.

There is indeed the _fiat_, the element of consent, or resolve that the

act shall ensue. This, doubtless, to the reader's mind, as to my own,

constitutes the essence of the voluntariness of the act. This _fiat_

will be treated of in detail farther on. It may be entirely neglected

here, for it is a constant coefficient, affecting all voluntary actions

alike, and incapable of serving to distinguish them. No one will

pretend that its quality varies according as the right arm, for example,

or the left is used.

_An anticipatory image, then, of the sensorial consequences of a

movement, plus (on certain occasions) the fiat that these consequences

shall become actual, is the only psychic state which introspection lets

us discern as the forerunner of our voluntary acts._ There is no

coercive evidence of any feeling attached to the efferent discharge.

The entire content and material of our consciousness--consciousness of

movement, as of all things else--seems thus to be of peripheral origin,

and to come to us in the first instance through the peripheral nerves.

_The Motor-cue._--Let us call the last idea which in the mind precedes

the motor discharge the 'motor-cue.' Now do 'resident' images form the

only motor-cue, or will 'remote' ones equally suffice?

_There can be no doubt whatever that the cue may be an image either of

the resident or of the remote kind._ Although, at the outset of our

learning a movement, it would seem that the resident feelings must come

strongly before consciousness, later this need not be the case. The

rule, in fact, would seem to be that they tend to lapse more and more

from consciousness, and that the more practised we become in a movement,

the more 'remote' do the ideas become which form its mental cue. What we

are _interested_ in is what sticks in our consciousness; everything else

we get rid of as quickly as we can. Our resident feelings of movement

have no substantive interest for us at all, as a rule. What interest us

are the ends which the movement is to attain. Such an end is generally a

remote sensation, an impression which the movement produces on the eye

or ear, or sometimes on the skin, nose, or palate. Now let the idea of

such an end associate itself definitely with the right discharge, and

the thought of the innervation's _resident_ effects will become as great

an encumbrance as we have already concluded that the feeling of the

innervation itself is. The mind does not need it; the end alone is

enough.

The idea of the end, then, tends more and more to make itself

all-sufficient. Or, at any rate, if the kinæsthetic ideas are called up

at all, they are so swamped in the vivid kinæsthetic feelings by which

they are immediately overtaken that we have no time to be aware of their

separate existence. As I write, I have no anticipation, as a thing

distinct from my sensation, of either the look or the digital feel of

the letters which flow from my pen. The words chime on my mental _ear_,

as it were, before I write them, but not on my mental eye or hand. This

comes from the rapidity with which the movements follow on their mental

cue. An end consented to as soon as conceived innervates directly the

centre of the first movement of the chain which leads to its

accomplishment, and then the whole chain rattles off _quasi_-reflexly,

as was described on pp. 115-6.

The reader will certainly recognize this to be true in all fluent and

unhesitating voluntary acts. The only special fiat there is at the

outset of the performance. A man says to himself, "I must change my

clothes," and involuntarily he has taken off his coat, and his fingers

are at work in their accustomed manner on his waistcoat-buttons, etc.;

or we say, "I must go downstairs," and ere we know it we have risen,

walked, and turned the handle of the door;--all through the idea of an

end coupled with a series of guiding sensations which successively

arise. It would seem indeed that we fail of accuracy and certainty in

our attainment of the end whenever we are preoccupied with the way in

which the movement will feel. We walk a beam the better the less we

think of the position of our feet upon it. We pitch or catch, we shoot

or chop the better the less tactile and muscular (the less resident),

and the more exclusively optical (the more remote), our consciousness

is. Keep your _eye_ on the place aimed at, and your hand will fetch it;

think of your hand, and you will very likely miss your aim. Dr.

Southard found that he could touch a spot with a pencil-point more

accurately with a visual than with a tactile mental cue. In the former

case he looked at a small object and closed his eyes before trying to

touch it. In the latter case he _placed_ it with closed eyes, and then

after removing his hand tried to touch it again. The average error with

touch (when the results were most favorable) was 17.13 mm. With sight it

was only 12.37 mm.--All these are plain results of introspection and

observation. By what neural machinery they are made possible we do not

know.

In Chapter XIX we saw how enormously individuals differ in respect to

their mental imagery. In the type of imagination called _tactile_ by the

French authors, it is probable that the kinæsthetic ideas are more

prominent than in my account. We must not expect too great a uniformity

in individual accounts, nor wrangle overmuch as to which one 'truly'

represents the process.

I trust that I have now made clear what that 'idea of a movement' is

which must precede it in order that it be voluntary. It is not the

thought of the innervation which the movement requires. It is the

anticipation of the movement's sensible effects, resident or remote, and

sometimes very remote indeed. Such anticipations, to say the least,

determine _what_ our movements shall be. I have spoken all along as if

they also might determine _that_ they shall be. This, no doubt, has

disconcerted many readers, for it certainly seems as if a special fiat,

or consent to the movement, were required in addition to the mere

conception of it, in many cases of volition; and this fiat I have

altogether left out of my account. This leads us to the next point in

our discussion.

=Ideo-motor Action.=--The question is this: _Is the bare idea of a

movement's sensible effects its sufficient motor-cue, or must there be

an additional mental antecedent, in the shape of a fiat, decision,

consent, volitional mandate, or other synonymous phenomenon of

consciousness, before the movement can follow?_

I answer: Sometimes the bare idea is sufficient, but sometimes an

additional conscious element, in the shape of a fiat, mandate, or

express consent, has to intervene and precede the movement. The cases

without a fiat constitute the more fundamental, because the more simple,

variety. The others involve a special complication, which must be fully

discussed at the proper time. For the present let us turn to _ideo-motor

action_, as it has been termed, or the sequence of movement upon the

mere thought of it, without a special fiat, as the type of the process

of volition.

Wherever a movement _unhesitatingly and immediately_ follows upon the

idea of it, we have ideo-motor action. We are then aware of nothing

between the conception and the execution. All sorts of neuro-muscular

processes come between, of course, but we know absolutely nothing of

them. We think the act, and it is done; and that is all that

introspection tells us of the matter. Dr. Carpenter, who first used, I

believe, the name of ideo-motor action, placed it, if I mistake not,

among the curiosities of our mental life. The truth is that it is no

curiosity, but simply the normal process stripped of disguise. Whilst

talking I become conscious of a pin on the floor, or of some dust on my

sleeve. Without interrupting the conversation I brush away the dust or

pick up the pin. I make no express resolve, but the mere perception of

the object and the fleeting notion of the act seem of themselves to

bring the latter about. Similarly, I sit at table after dinner and find

myself from time to time taking nuts or raisins out of the dish and

eating them. My dinner properly is over, and in the heat of the

conversation I am hardly aware of what I do; but the perception of the

fruit, and the fleeting notion that I may eat it, seem fatally to bring

the act about. There is certainly no express fiat here; any more than

there is in all those habitual goings and comings and rearrangements of

ourselves which fill every hour of the day, and which incoming

sensations instigate so immediately that it is often difficult to decide

whether not to call them reflex rather than voluntary acts. As Lotze

says:

"We see in writing or piano-playing a great number of very complicated

movements following quickly one upon the other, the instigative

representations of which remained scarcely a second in consciousness,

certainly not long enough to awaken any other volition than the general

one of resigning one's self without reserve to the passing over of

representation into action. All the acts of our daily life happen in

this wise: Our standing up, walking, talking, all this never demands a

distinct impulse of the will, but is adequately brought about by the

pure flux of thought."[54]

In all this the determining condition of the unhesitating and resistless

sequence of the act seems to be _the absence of any conflicting notion

in the mind_. Either there is nothing else at all in the mind, or what

is there does not conflict. We know what it is to get out of bed on a

freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital

principle within us protests against the ordeal. Probably most persons

have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace

themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties

of the day will suffer; we say, "I _must_ get up, this is ignominious,"

etc.; but still the warm couch feels too delicious, the cold outside too

cruel, and resolutions faints away and postpones itself again and again

just as it seemed on the verge of bursting the resistance and passing

over into the decisive act. Now how do we _ever_ get up under such

circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often

than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly

find that we _have_ got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs;

we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery

connected with the day's life, in the course of which the idea flashes

across us, "Hollo! I must lie here no longer"--an idea which at that

lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and

consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was

our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the cold during the

period of struggle, which paralyzed our activity then and kept our idea

of rising in the condition of _wish_ and not of _will_. The moment these

inhibitory ideas ceased, the original idea exerted its effects.

This case seems to me to contain in miniature form the data for an

entire psychology of volition. It was in fact through meditating on the

phenomenon in my own person that I first became convinced of the truth

of the doctrine which these pages present, and which I need here

illustrate by no farther examples. The reason why that doctrine is not a

self-evident truth is that we have so many ideas which _do not_ result

in action. But it will be seen that in every such case, without

exception, that is because other ideas simultaneously present rob them

of their impulsive power. But even here, and when a movement is

inhibited from _completely_ taking place by contrary ideas, it will

_incipiently_ take place. To quote Lotze once more:

"The spectator accompanies the throwing of a billiard-ball, or the

thrust of the swordsman, with slight movements of his arm; the untaught

narrator tells his story with many gesticulations; the reader while

absorbed in the perusal of a battle-scene feels a slight tension run

through his muscular system, keeping time as it were with the actions he

is reading of. These results become the more marked the more we are

absorbed in thinking of the movements which suggest them; they grow

fainter exactly in proportion as a complex consciousness, under the

dominion of a crowd of other representations, withstands the passing

over of mental contemplation into outward action."

The 'willing-game,' the exhibitions of so-called 'mind-reading,' or more

properly muscle-reading, which have lately grown so fashionable, are

based on this incipient obedience of muscular contraction to idea, even

when the deliberate intention is that no contraction shall occur.

We may then lay it down for certain that _every representation of a

movement awakens in some degree the actual movement which is its object;

and awakens it in a maximum degree whenever it is not kept from so doing

by an antagonistic representation present simultaneously to the mind_.

The express fiat, or act of mental consent to the movement, comes in

when the neutralization of the antagonistic and inhibitory idea is

required. But that there is no express fiat needed when the conditions

are simple, the reader ought now to be convinced. Lest, however, he

should still share the common prejudice that voluntary action without

'exertion of will-power' is Hamlet with the prince's part left out, I

will make a few farther remarks. The first point to start from, in

understanding voluntary action and the possible occurrence of it with no

fiat or express resolve, is the fact that consciousness is _in its very

nature impulsive_. We do not first have a sensation or thought, and then

have to _add_ something dynamic to it to get a movement. Every pulse of

feeling which we have is the correlate of some neural activity that is

already on its way to instigate a movement. Our sensations and thoughts

are but cross-sections, as it were, of currents whose essential

consequence is motion, and which have no sooner run in at one nerve than

they are ready to run out by another. The popular notion that

consciousness is not essentially a forerunner of activity, but that the

latter must result from some superadded 'will-force,' is a very natural

inference from those special cases in which we think of an act for an

indefinite length of time without the action taking place. These cases,

however, are not the norm; they are cases of inhibition by antagonistic

thoughts. When the blocking is released we feel as if an inward spring

were let loose, and this is the additional impulse or _fiat_ upon which

the act effectively succeeds. We shall study anon the blocking and its

release. Our higher thought is full of it. But where there is no

blocking, there is naturally no hiatus between the thought-process and

the motor discharge. _Movement is the natural immediate effect of the

process of feeling, irrespective of what the quality of the feeling may

be. It is so in reflex action, it is so in emotional expression, it is

so in the voluntary life._ Ideo-motor action is thus no paradox, to be

softened or explained away. It obeys the type of all conscious action,

and from it one must start to explain the sort of action in which a

special fiat is involved.

It may be remarked in passing, that the inhibition of a movement no more

involves an express effort or command than its execution does. Either of

them _may_ require it. But in all simple and ordinary cases, just as the

bare presence of one idea prompts a movement, so the bare presence of

another idea will prevent its taking place. Try to feel as if you were

crooking your finger, whilst keeping it straight. In a minute it will

fairly tingle with the imaginary change of position; yet it will not

sensibly move, because _its not really moving_ is also a part of what

you have in mind. Drop _this_ idea, think purely and simply of the

movement, and nothing else, and, presto! it takes place with no effort

at all.

A waking man's behavior is thus at all times the resultant of two

opposing neural forces. With unimaginable fineness some currents among

the cells and fibres of his brain are playing on his motor nerves,

whilst other currents, as unimaginably fine, are playing on the first

currents, damming or helping them, altering their direction or their

speed. The upshot of it all is, that whilst the currents must always end

by being drained off through _some_ motor nerves, they are drained off

sometimes through one set and sometimes through another; and sometimes

they keep each other in equilibrium so long that a superficial observer

may think they are not drained off at all. Such an observer must

remember, however, that from the physiological point of view a gesture,

an expression of the brow, or an expulsion of the breath are movements

as much as an act of locomotion is. A king's breath slays as well as an

assassin's blow; and the outpouring of those currents which the magic

imponderable streaming of our ideas accompanies need not always be of an

explosive or otherwise physically conspicuous kind.

=Action after Deliberation.=--We are now in a position to describe _what

happens in deliberate action_, or when the mind has many objects before

it, related to each other in antagonistic or in favorable ways. One of

these objects of its thought may be an act. By itself this would prompt

a movement; some of the additional objects or considerations, however,

block the motor discharge, whilst others, on the contrary, solicit it to

take place. The result is that peculiar feeling of inward unrest known

as _indecision_. Fortunately it is too familiar to need description, for

to describe it would be impossible. As long as it lasts, with the

various objects before the attention, we are said to _deliberate_; and

when finally the original suggestion either prevails and makes the

movement take place, or gets definitively quenched by its antagonists,

we are said to _decide_, or to _utter our voluntary fiat_, in favor of

one or the other course. The reinforcing and inhibiting objects

meanwhile are termed the _reasons_ or _motives_ by which the decision is

brought about.

The process of deliberation contains endless degrees of complication. At

every moment of it our consciousness is of an extremely complex thing,

namely, the whole set of motives and their conflict. Of this complicated

object, the totality of which is realized more or less dimly all the

while by consciousness, certain parts stand out more or less sharply at

one moment in the foreground, and at another moment other parts, in

consequence of the oscillations of our attention, and of the

'associative' flow of our ideas. But no matter how sharp the

foreground-reasons may be, or how imminently close to bursting through

the dam and carrying the motor consequences their own way, the

background, however dimly felt, is always there as a fringe (p. 163);

and its presence (so long as the indecision actually lasts) serves as an

effective check upon the irrevocable discharge. The deliberation may

last for weeks or months, occupying at intervals the mind. The motives

which yesterday seemed full of urgency and blood and life to-day feel

strangely weak and pale and dead. But as little to-day as to-morrow is

the question finally resolved. Something tells us that all this is

provisional; that the weakened reasons will wax strong again, and the

stronger weaken; that equilibrium is unreached; that testing our

reasons, not obeying them, is still the order of the day, and that we

must wait awhile, patiently or impatiently, until our mind is made up

'for good and all.' This inclining first to one, then to another future,

both of which we represent as possible, resembles the oscillations to

and fro of a material body within the limits of its elasticity. There is

inward strain, but no outward rupture. And this condition, plainly

enough, is susceptible of indefinite continuance, as well in the

physical mass as in the mind. If the elasticity give way, however, if

the dam ever do break, and the currents burst the crust, vacillation is

over and decision is irrevocably there.

The decision may come in either of many modes. I will try briefly to

sketch the most characteristic types of it, merely warning the reader

that this is only an introspective account of symptoms and phenomena,

and that all questions of causal agency, whether neural or spiritual,

are relegated to a later page.

=Five Chief Types of Decision.=--Turning now to the form of the decision

itself, we may distinguish five chief types. _The first may be called

the reasonable type._ It is that of those cases in which the arguments

for and against a given course seem gradually and almost insensibly to

settle themselves in the mind and to end by leaving a clear balance in

favor of one alternative, which alternative we then adopt without effort

or constraint. Until this rational balancing of the books is consummated

we have a calm feeling that the evidence is not yet all in, and this

keeps action in suspense. But some day we wake with the sense that we

see the matter rightly, that no new light will be thrown on it by

farther delay, and that it had better be settled _now_. In this easy

transition from doubt to assurance we seem to ourselves almost passive;

the 'reasons' which decide us appearing to flow in from the nature of

things, and to owe nothing to our will. We have, however, a perfect

sense of being _free_, in that we are devoid of any feeling of coercion.

The conclusive reason for the decision in these cases usually is the

discovery that we can refer the case to a _class_ upon which we are

accustomed to act unhesitatingly in a certain stereotyped way. It may be

said in general that a great part of every deliberation consists in the

turning over of all the possible modes of _conceiving_ the doing or not

doing of the act in point. The moment we hit upon a conception which

lets us apply some principle of action which is a fixed and stable part

of our Ego, our state of doubt is at an end. Persons of authority, who

have to make many decisions in the day, carry with them a set of heads

of classification, each bearing its volitional consequence, and under

these they seek as far as possible to range each new emergency as it

occurs. It is where the emergency belongs to a species without

precedent, to which consequently no cut-and-dried maxim will apply, that

we feel most at a loss, and are distressed at the indeterminateness of

our task. As soon, however, as we see our way to a familiar

classification, we are at ease again. _In action as in reasoning, then,

the great thing is the quest of the right conception._ The concrete

dilemmas do not come to us with labels gummed upon their backs. We may

name them by many names. The wise man is he who succeeds in finding the

name which suits the needs of the particular occasion best (p. 357 ff.).

A 'reasonable' character is one who has a store of stable and worthy

ends, and who does not decide about an action till he has calmly

ascertained whether it be ministerial or detrimental to any one of

these.

In the next two types of decision, the final fiat occurs before the

evidence is all 'in.' It often happens that no paramount and

authoritative reason for either course will come. Either seems a good,

and there is no umpire to decide which should yield its place to the

other. We grow tired of long hesitation and inconclusiveness, and the

hour may come when we feel that even a bad decision is better than no

decision at all. Under these conditions it will often happen that some

accidental circumstance, supervening at a particular movement upon our

mental weariness, will upset the balance in the direction of one of the

alternatives, to which then we feel ourselves committed, although an

opposite accident at the same time might have produced the opposite

result.

In the _second type_ our feeling is to a great extent that of letting

ourselves drift with a certain indifferent acquiescence in a direction

accidentally determined _from without_, with the conviction that, after

all, we might as well stand by this course as by the other, and that

things are in any event sure to turn out sufficiently right.

_In the third type_ the determination seems equally accidental, but it

comes from within, and not from without. It often happens, when the

absence of imperative principle is perplexing and suspense distracting,

that we find ourselves acting, as it were, automatically, and as if by a

spontaneous discharge of our nerves, in the direction of one of the

horns of the dilemma. But so exciting is this sense of motion after our

intolerable pent-up state that we eagerly throw ourselves into it.

'Forward now!' we inwardly cry, 'though the heavens fall.' This reckless

and exultant espousal of an energy so little premeditated by us that we

feel rather like passive spectators cheering on the display of some

extraneous force than like voluntary agents is a type of decision too

abrupt and tumultuous to occur often in humdrum and cool-blooded

natures. But it is probably frequent in persons of strong emotional

endowment and unstable or vacillating character. And in men of the

world-shaking type, the Napoleons, Luthers, etc., in whom tenacious

passion combines with ebullient activity, when by any chance the

passion's outlet has been dammed by scruples or apprehensions, the

resolution is probably often of this catastrophic kind. The flood breaks

quite unexpectedly through the dam. That it should so often do so is

quite sufficient to account for the tendency of these characters to a

fatalistic mood of mind. And the fatalistic mood itself is sure to

reinforce the strength of the energy just started on its exciting path

of discharge.

There is a _fourth form_ of decision, which often ends deliberation as

suddenly as the third form does. It comes when, in consequence of some

outer experience or some inexplicable inward change, _we suddenly pass

from the easy and careless to the sober and strenuous mood_, or possibly

the other way. The whole scale of values of our motives and impulses

then undergoes a change like that which a change of the observer's level

produces on a view. The most sobering possible agents are objects of

grief and fear. When one of these affects us, all 'light fantastic'

notions lose their motive power, all solemn ones find theirs multiplied

many-fold. The consequence is an instant abandonment of the more trivial

projects with which we had been dallying, and an instant practical

acceptance of the more grim and earnest alternative which till then

could not extort our mind's consent. All those 'changes of heart,'

'awakenings of conscience,' etc., which make new men of so many of us

may be classed under this head. The character abruptly rises to another

'level,' and deliberation comes to an immediate end.

In the _fifth and final type_ of decision, the feeling that the

evidence is all in, and that reason has balanced the books, may be

either present or absent. But in either case we feel, in deciding, as if

we ourselves by our own wilful act inclined the beam: in the former case

by adding our living effort to the weight of the logical reason which,

taken alone, seems powerless to make the act discharge; in the latter by

a kind of creative contribution of something instead of a reason which

does a reason's work. The slow dead heave of the will that is felt in

these instances makes of them a class altogether different subjectively

from all the four preceding classes. What the heave of the will betokens

metaphysically, what the effort might lead us to infer about a

will-power distinct from motives, are not matters that concern us yet.

Subjectively and phenomenally, the _feeling of effort_, absent from the

former decisions, accompanies these. Whether it be the dreary

resignation for the sake of austere and naked duty of all sorts of rich

mundane delights; or whether it be the heavy resolve that of two

mutually exclusive trains of future fact, both sweet and good and with

no strictly objective or imperative principle of choice between them,

one shall forevermore become impossible, while the other shall become

reality; it is a desolate and acrid sort of act, an entrance into a

lonesome moral wilderness. If examined closely, its chief difference

from the former cases appears to be that in those cases the mind at the

moment of deciding on the triumphant alternative dropped the other one

wholly or nearly out of sight, whereas here both alternatives are

steadily held in view, and in the very act of murdering the vanquished

possibility the chooser realizes how much in that instant he is making

himself lose. It is deliberately driving a thorn into one's flesh; and

the sense of _inward effort_ with which the act is accompanied is an

element which sets this fifth type of decision in strong contrast with

the previous four varieties, and makes of it an altogether peculiar sort

of mental phenomenon. The immense majority of human decisions are

decisions without effort. In comparatively few of them, in most people,

does effort accompany the final act. We are, I think, misled into

supposing that effort is more frequent than it is by the fact that

_during deliberation_ we so often have a feeling of how great an effort

it would take to make a decision _now_. Later, after the decision has

made itself with ease, we recollect this and erroneously suppose the

effort also to have been made then.

The existence of the effort as a phenomenal fact in our consciousness

cannot of course be doubted or denied. Its significance, on the other

hand, is a matter about which the gravest difference of opinion

prevails. Questions as momentous as that of the very existence of

spiritual causality, as vast as that of universal predestination or

free-will, depend on its interpretation. It therefore becomes essential

that we study with some care the conditions under which the feeling of

volitional effort is found.

=The Feeling of Effort.=--When I said, awhile back, that _consciousness_

(or the neural process which goes with it) _is in its very nature

impulsive_, I should have added the proviso that _it must be

sufficiently intense_. Now there are remarkable differences in the power

of different sorts of consciousness to excite movement. The intensity of

some feelings is practically apt to be below the discharging point,

whilst that of others is apt to be above it. By practically apt, I mean

apt under ordinary circumstances. These circumstances may be habitual

inhibitions, like that comfortable feeling of the _dolce far niente_

which gives to each and all of us a certain dose of laziness only to be

overcome by the acuteness of the impulsive spur; or they may consist in

the native inertia, or internal resistance, of the motor centres

themselves, making explosion impossible until a certain inward tension

has been reached and over-passed. These conditions may vary from one

person to another, and in the same person from time to time. The neural

inertia may wax or wane, and the habitual inhibitions dwindle or

augment. The intensity of particular thought-processes and stimulations

may also change independently, and particular paths of association grow

more pervious or less so. There thus result great possibilities of

alteration in the actual impulsive efficacy of particular motives

compared with others. It is where the normally less efficacious motive

becomes more efficacious, and the normally more efficacious one less so,

that actions ordinarily effortless, or abstinences ordinarily easy,

either become impossible, or are effected (if at all) by the expenditure

of effort. A little more description will make it plainer what these

cases are.

=Healthiness of Will.=--_There is a certain normal ratio in the impulsive

power of different mental objects, which characterizes what may be

called ordinary healthiness of will_, and which is departed from only at

exceptional times or by exceptional individuals. The states of mind

which normally possess the most impulsive quality are either those which

represent objects of passion, appetite, or emotion--objects of

instinctive reaction, in short; or they are feelings or ideas of

pleasure or of pain; or ideas which for any reason we have grown

accustomed to obey, so that the habit of reacting on them is ingrained;

or finally, in comparison with ideas of remoter objects, they are ideas

of objects present or near in space and time. Compared with these

various objects, all far-off considerations, all highly abstract

conceptions, unaccustomed reasons, and motives foreign to the

instinctive history of the race, have little or no impulsive power. They

prevail, when they ever do prevail, _with effort_; _and the normal_, as

distinguished from the pathological, _sphere of effort is thus found

wherever non-instinctive motives to behavior must be reinforced so as to

rule the day_.

Healthiness of will moreover requires a certain amount of complication

in the process which precedes the fiat or the act. Each stimulus or

idea, at the same time that it wakens its own impulse, must also arouse

other ideas along with _their_ characteristic impulses, and action must

finally follow, neither too slowly nor too rapidly, as the resultant of

all the forces thus engaged. Even when the decision is pretty prompt,

the normal thing is thus a sort of preliminary survey of the field and a

vision of which course is best before the fiat comes. And where the will

is healthy, _the vision must be right_ (i.e., the motives must be on the

whole in a normal or not too unusual ratio to each other), _and the

action must obey the vision's lead_.

=Unhealthiness of will= may thus come about in many ways. The action may

follow the stimulus or idea too rapidly, leaving no time for the arousal

of restraining associates--_we then have a precipitate will_. Or,

although the associates may come, the ratio which the impulsive and

inhibitive forces normally bear to each other may be distorted, and we

then have _a will which is perverse_. The perversity, in turn, may be

due to either of many causes--too much intensity, or too little, here;

too much or too little inertia there; or elsewhere too much or too

little inhibitory power. _If we compare the outward symptoms of

perversity together, they fall into two groups_, in one of which normal

actions are impossible, and in the other abnormal ones are

irrepressible. Briefly, _we may call them respectively the obstructed

and the explosive will_.

It must be kept in mind, however, that since the resultant action is

always due to the _ratio_ between the obstructive and the explosive

forces which are present, we never can tell by the mere outward symptoms

to what _elementary_ cause the perversion of a man's will may be due,

whether to an increase of one component or a diminution of the other.

One may grow explosive as readily by losing the usual brakes as by

getting up more of the impulsive steam; and one may find things

impossible as well through the enfeeblement of the original desire as

through the advent of new lions in the path. As Dr. Clouston says, "the

driver may be so weak that he cannot control well-broken horses, or the

horses may be so hard-mouthed that no driver can pull them up."

=The Explosive Will.= 1.) =From Defective Inhibition.=--There is a normal

type of character, for example, in which impulses seem to discharge so

promptly into movements that inhibitions get no time to arise. These are

the 'dare-devil' and 'mercurial' temperaments, overflowing with

animation and fizzling with talk, which are so common in the Slavic and

Celtic races, and with which the cold-blooded and long-headed English

character forms so marked a contrast. Simian these people seem to us,

whilst we seem to them reptilian. It is quite impossible to judge, as

between an obstructed and an explosive individual, which has the greater

sum of vital energy. An explosive Italian with good perception and

intellect will cut a figure as a perfectly tremendous fellow, on an

inward capital that could be tucked away inside of an obstructed Yankee

and hardly let you know that it was there. He will be the king of his

company, sing the songs and make the speeches, lead the parties, carry

out the practical jokes, kiss the girls, fight the men, and, if need be,

lead the forlorn hopes and enterprises, so that an onlooker would think

he has more life in his little finger than can exist in the whole body

of a correct judicious fellow. But the judicious fellow all the while

may have all these possibilities and more besides, ready to break out in

the same or even a more violent way, if only the brakes were taken off.

It is the absence of scruples, of consequences, of considerations, the

extraordinary simplification of each moment's mental outlook, that gives

to the explosive individual such motor energy and ease; it need not be

the greater intensity of any of his passions, motives, or thoughts. As

mental evolution goes on, the complexity of human consciousness grows

ever greater, and with it the multiplication of the inhibitions to which

every impulse is exposed. How much freedom of discourse we English folk

lose because we feel obliged always to speak the truth! This

predominance of inhibition has a bad as well as a good side; and if a

man's impulses are in the main orderly as well as prompt, if he has

courage to accept their consequences, and intellect to lead them to a

successful end, he is all the better for his hair-trigger organization,

and for not being 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' Many of

the most successful military and revolutionary characters in history

have belonged to this simple but quick-witted impulsive type. Problems

come much harder to reflective and inhibitive minds. They can, it is

true, solve much vaster problems; and they can avoid many a mistake to

which the men of impulse are exposed. But when the latter do not make

mistakes, or when they are always able to retrieve them, theirs is one

of the most engaging and indispensable of human types.

In infancy, and in certain conditions of exhaustion, as well as in

peculiar pathological states, the inhibitory power may fail to arrest

the explosions of the impulsive discharge. We have then an explosive

temperament temporarily realized in an individual who at other times may

be of a relatively obstructed type. In other persons, again, hysterics,

epileptics, criminals of the neurotic class called _dégénérés_ by French

authors, there is such a native feebleness in the mental machinery that

before the inhibitory ideas can arise the impulsive ones have already

discharged into act. In persons healthy-willed by nature bad habits can

bring about this condition, especially in relation to particular sorts

of impulse. Ask half the common drunkards you know why it is that they

fall so often a prey to temptation, and they will say that most of the

time they cannot tell. It is a sort of vertigo with them. Their nervous

centres have become a sluice-way pathologically unlocked by every

passing conception of a bottle and a glass. They do not thirst for the

beverage; the taste of it may even appear repugnant; and they perfectly

foresee the morrow's remorse. But when they think of the liquor or see

it, they find themselves preparing to drink, and do not stop themselves:

and more than this they cannot say. Similarly a man may lead a life of

incessant love-making or sexual indulgence, though what spurs him

thereto seems to be trivial suggestions and notions of possibility

rather than any real solid strength of passion or desire. Such

characters are too flimsy even to be bad in any deep sense of the word.

The paths of natural (or it may be unnatural) impulse are so pervious in

them that the slightest rise in the level of innervation produces an

overflow. It is the condition recognized in pathology as 'irritable

weakness.' The phase known as nascency or latency is so short in the

excitement of the neural tissues that there is no opportunity for strain

or tension to accumulate within them; and the consequence is that with

all the agitation and activity, the amount of real feeling engaged may

be very small. The hysterical temperament is the playground _par

excellence_ of this unstable equilibrium. One of these subjects will be

filled with what seems the most genuine and settled aversion to a

certain line of conduct, and the very next _instant_ follow the stirring

of temptation and plunge in it up to the neck.

2.) =From Exaggerated Impulsion.=--Disorderly and impulsive conduct may,

on the other hand, come about where the neural tissues preserve their

proper inward tone, and where the inhibitory power is normal or even

unusually great. In such cases _the strength of the impulsive idea is

preternaturally exalted_, and what would be for most people the passing

suggestion of a possibility becomes a gnawing, craving urgency to act.

Works on insanity are full of examples of these morbid insistent ideas,

in obstinately struggling against which the unfortunate victim's soul

often sweats with agony ere at last it gets swept away.

The craving for drink in real dipsomaniacs, or for opium or chloral in

those subjugated, is of a strength of which normal persons can form no

conception. "Were a keg of rum in one corner of a room and were a cannon

constantly discharging balls between me and it, I could not refrain

from passing before that cannon in order to get the rum;" "If a bottle

of brandy stood at one hand and the pit of hell yawned at the other, and

I were convinced that I should be pushed in as sure as I took one glass,

I could not refrain:" such statements abound in dipsomaniacs' mouths.

Dr. Mussey of Cincinnati relates this case:

"A few years ago a tippler was put into an almshouse in this State.

Within a few days he had devised various expedients to procure rum, but

failed. At length, however, he hit upon one which was successful. He

went into the wood-yard of the establishment, placed one hand upon the

block, and with an axe in the other struck it off at a single blow. With

the stump raised and streaming he ran into the house and cried, 'Get

some rum! get some rum! My hand is off!' In the confusion and bustle of

the occasion a bowl of rum was brought, into which he plunged the

bleeding member of his body, then raising the bowl to his mouth, drank

freely, and exultingly exclaimed, 'Now I am satisfied.' Dr. J. E. Turner

tells of a man who, while under treatment for inebriety, during four

weeks secretly drank the alcohol from six jars containing morbid

specimens. On asking him why he had committed this loathsome act, he

replied: 'Sir, it is as impossible for me to control this diseased

appetite as it is for me to control the pulsations of my heart.'"

Often the insistent idea is of a trivial sort, but it may wear the

patient's life out. His hands feel dirty, they must be washed. He

_knows_ they are not dirty; yet to get rid of the teasing idea he washes

them. The idea, however, returns in a moment, and the unfortunate

victim, who is not in the least deluded _intellectually_, will end by

spending the whole day at the wash-stand. Or his clothes are not

'rightly' put on; and to banish the thought he takes them off and puts

them on again, till his toilet consumes two or three hours of time. Most

people have the potentiality of this disease. To few has it not

happened to conceive, after getting into bed, that they may have

forgotten to lock the front door, or to turn out the entry gas. And few

of us have not on some occasion got up to repeat the performance, less

because we believed in the reality of its omission than because only so

could we banish the worrying doubt and get to sleep.

=The Obstructed Will.=--In striking contrast with the cases in which

inhibition is insufficient or impulsion in excess are those in which

impulsion is insufficient or inhibition in excess. We all know the

condition described on p. 218, in which the mind for a few moments seems

to lose its focussing power and to be unable to rally its attention to

any determinate thing. At such times we sit blankly staring and do

nothing. The objects of consciousness fail to touch the quick or break

the skin. They are there, but do not reach the level of effectiveness.

This state of non-efficacious presence is the normal condition of _some_

objects, in all of us. Great fatigue or exhaustion may make it the

condition of almost all objects; and an apathy resembling that then

brought about is recognized in asylums under the name of _abulia_ as a

symptom of mental disease. The healthy state of the will requires, as

aforesaid, both that vision should be right, and that action should obey

its lead. But in the morbid condition in question the vision may be

wholly unaffected, and the intellect clear, and yet the act either fails

to follow or follows in some other way.

"_Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor_" is the classic expression

of this latter condition of mind. The moral tragedy of human life comes

almost wholly from the fact that the link is ruptured which normally

should hold between vision of the truth and action, and that this

pungent sense of effective reality will not attach to certain ideas. Men

do not differ so much in their mere feelings and conceptions. Their

notions of possibility and their ideals are not as far apart as might be

argued from their differing fates. No class of them have better

sentiments or feel more constantly the difference between the higher

and the lower path in life than the hopeless failures, the

sentimentalists, the drunkards, the schemers, the 'deadbeats,' whose

life is one long contradiction between knowledge and action, and who,

with full command of theory, never get to holding their limp characters

erect. No one eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge as they do; as

far as moral insight goes, in comparison with them, the orderly and

prosperous philistines whom they scandalize are sucking babes. And yet

their moral knowledge, always there grumbling and rumbling in the

background,--discerning, commenting, protesting, longing, half

resolving,--never wholly resolves, never gets its voice out of the minor

into the major key, or its speech out of the subjunctive into the

imperative mood, never breaks the spell, never takes the helm into its

hands. In such characters as Rousseau and Restif it would seem as if the

lower motives had all the impulsive efficacy in their hands. Like trains

with the right of way, they retain exclusive possession of the track.

The more ideal motives exist alongside of them in profusion, but they

never get switched on, and the man's conduct is no more influenced by

them than an express train is influenced by a wayfarer standing by the

roadside and calling to be taken aboard. They are an inert accompaniment

to the end of time; and the consciousness of inward hollowness that

accrues from habitually seeing the better only to do the worse, is one

of the saddest feelings one can bear with him through this vale of

tears.

=Effort feels like an original force.= We now see at one view when it is

that effort complicates volition. It does so whenever a rarer and more

ideal impulse is called upon to neutralize others of a more instinctive

and habitual kind; it does so whenever strongly explosive tendencies are

checked, or strongly obstructive conditions overcome. The _âme bien

née_, the child of the sunshine, at whose birth the fairies made their

gifts, does not need much of it in his life. The hero and the neurotic

subject, on the other hand, do. Now our spontaneous way of conceiving

the effort, under all these circumstances, is as an active force adding

its strength to that of the motives which ultimately prevail. When outer

forces impinge upon a body, we say that the resultant motion is in the

line of least resistance, or of greatest traction. But it is a curious

fact that our spontaneous language never speaks of volition with effort

in this way. Of course if we proceed _a priori_ and define the line of

least resistance as the line that is followed, the physical law must

also hold good in the mental sphere. But we _feel_, in all hard cases of

volition, as if the line taken, when the rarer and more ideal motives

prevail, were the line of greater resistance, and as if the line of

coarser motivation were the more pervious and easy one, even at the very

moment when we refuse to follow it. He who under the surgeon's knife

represses cries of pain, or he who exposes himself to social obloquy for

duty's sake, feels as if he were following the line of greatest

temporary resistance. He speaks of conquering and overcoming his

impulses and temptations.

But the sluggard, the drunkard, the coward, never talk of their conduct

in that way, or say they resist their energy, overcome their sobriety,

conquer their courage, and so forth. If in general we class all springs

of action as propensities on the one hand and ideals on the other, the

sensualist never says of his behavior that it results from a victory

over his ideals, but the moralist always speaks of his as a victory over

his propensities. The sensualist uses terms of inactivity, says he

forgets his ideals, is deaf to duty, and so forth; which terms seem to

imply that the ideal motives _per se_ can be annulled without energy or

effort, and that the strongest mere traction lies in the line of the

propensities. The ideal impulse appears, in comparison with this, a

still small voice which must be artificially reinforced to prevail.

Effort is what reinforces it, making things seem as if, while the force

of propensity were essentially a fixed quantity, the ideal force might

be of various amount. But what determines the amount of the effort when,

by its aid, an ideal motive becomes victorious over a great sensual

resistance? The very greatness of the resistance itself. If the sensual

propensity is small, the effort is small. The latter is _made great_ by

the presence of a great antagonist to overcome. And if a brief

definition of ideal or moral action were required, none could be given

which would better fit the appearances than this: _It is action in the

line of the greatest resistance_.

* * * * *

The facts may be most briefly symbolized thus, P standing for the

propensity, I for the ideal impulse, and E for the effort:

I _per se_ < P.

I + E > P.

In other words, if E adds itself to I, P immediately offers the least

resistance, and motion occurs in spite of it.

But the E does not seem to form an integral part of the I. It appears

adventitious and indeterminate in advance. We can make more or less as

we please, and _if_ we make enough we can convert the greatest mental

resistance into the least. Such, at least, is the impression which the

facts spontaneously produce upon us. But we will not discuss the truth

of this impression at present; let us rather continue our descriptive

detail.

=Pleasure and Pain as Springs of Action.=--Objects and thoughts of objects

start our action, but the pleasures and pains which action brings modify

its course and regulate it; and later the thoughts of the pleasures and

the pains acquire themselves impulsive and inhibitive power. Not that

the thought of a pleasure need be itself a pleasure, usually it is the

reverse--_nessun maggior dolore_--as Dante says--and not that the

thought of pain need be a pain, for, as Homer says, "griefs are often

afterwards an entertainment." But as present pleasures are tremendous

reinforcers, and present pains tremendous inhibitors of whatever action

leads to them, so the thoughts of pleasures and pains take rank amongst

the thoughts which have most impulsive and inhibitive power. The precise

relation which these thoughts hold to other thoughts is thus a matter

demanding some attention.

* * * * *

If a movement feels agreeable, we repeat and repeat it as long as the

pleasure lasts. If it hurts us, our muscular contractions at the instant

stop. So complete is the inhibition in this latter case that it is

almost impossible for a man to cut or mutilate himself slowly and

deliberately--his hand invincibly refusing to bring on the pain. And

there are many pleasures which, when once we have begun to taste them,

make it all but obligatory to keep up the activity to which they are

due. So widespread and searching is this influence of pleasures and

pains upon our movements that a premature philosophy has decided that

these are our only spurs to action, and that wherever they seem to be

absent, it is only because they are so far on among the 'remoter' images

that prompt the action that they are overlooked.

This is a great mistake, however. Important as is the influence of

pleasures and pains upon our movements, they are far from being our only

stimuli. With the manifestations of instinct and emotional expression,

for example, they have absolutely nothing to do. Who smiles for the

pleasure of the smiling, or frowns for the pleasure of the frown? Who

blushes to escape the discomfort of not blushing? Or who in anger,

grief, or fear is actuated to the movements which he makes by the

pleasures which they yield? In all these cases the movements are

discharged fatally by the _vis a tergo_ which the stimulus exerts upon a

nervous system framed to respond in just that way. The objects of our

rage, love, or terror, the occasions of our tears and smiles, whether

they be present to our senses, or whether they be merely represented in

idea, have this peculiar sort of impulsive power. The _impulsive

quality_ of mental states is an attribute behind which we cannot go.

Some states of mind have more of it than others, some have it in this

direction and some in that. Feelings of pleasure and pain have it, and

perceptions and imaginations of fact have it, but neither have it

exclusively or peculiarly. It is of the essence of all consciousness (or

of the neural process which underlies it) to instigate movement of some

sort. That with one creature and object it should be of one sort, with

others of another sort, is a problem for evolutionary history to

explain. However the actual impulsions may have arisen, they must now be

described as they exist; and those persons obey a curiously narrow

teleological superstition who think themselves bound to interpret them

in every instance as effects of the secret solicitancy of pleasure and

repugnancy of pain. 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.' 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.

=What holds attention determines action.= 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. 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. If the ganglia work duly, the act occurs perfectly. If they

work, but work wrongly, we have St. Vitus's dance, locomotor ataxy,

motor aphasia, or minor degrees of awkwardness. If they don't work at

all, the act fails altogether, and we say the man is paralyzed. He may

make a tremendous effort, and contract the other muscles of the body,

but the paralyzed limb fails to move. In all these cases, however, the

volition considered as a psychic process is intact.

=Volitional effort is effort of attention.= 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 action 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 shall 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.

_Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will._[55]

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 wise? 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. 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 ideal object of our thought. It is, in one word, 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 430, 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-impulsive one,

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

crowd it out of sight, and to find for the emergency names 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; also 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.

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. Often again it may be 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 ideas 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."

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.

=The Question of 'Free-will.'=--As was remarked on p. 443, in the

experience of effort we feel as if we might make more or less than we

actually at any moment are making.

The effort appears, in other words, not as a fixed reaction on our part

which the object that resists us necessarily calls forth, but as what

the mathematicians call an 'independent variable' amongst the fixed

data of the case, our motives, character, etc. If it be really so, if

the amount of our effort is not a determinate function of those other

data, then, in common parlance, _our wills are free_. If, on the

contrary, the amount of effort be a fixed function, so 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 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 we might exert

more or less 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?

_The fact 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 that actually

came. Such measurements, whether of psychic or of neural quantities, and

such deductive reasonings 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. Had one no motives drawn from elsewhere to make one partial to

either solution, one might easily leave the matter undecided. But a

psychologist cannot be expected to be thus impartial, having a great

motive in favor of determinism. He wants to build a _Science_; and a

Science is a system of fixed relations. Wherever there are independent

variables, there Science stops. So far, then, as our volitions may be

independent variables, a scientific psychology must ignore that fact,

and treat of them only so far as they are fixed functions. In other

words, she must deal with the _general laws_ of volition exclusively;

with the impulsive and inhibitory character of ideas; with the nature of

their appeals to the attention; with the conditions under which effort

may arise, etc.; but not with the precise amounts of effort, for these,

if our wills be free, are impossible to compute. She thus abstracts from

free-will, without necessarily denying its existence. Practically,

however, such abstraction is not distinguished from rejection; and most

actual psychologists have no hesitation in denying that free-will

exists.

For ourselves, we can hand the free-will controversy over to

metaphysics. Psychology will surely never grow refined enough to

discover, in the case of any individual's decision, a discrepancy

between her scientific calculations and the fact. Her prevision will

never foretell, whether the effort be completely predestinate or not,

the way in which each individual emergency is resolved. Psychology will

be psychology, and Science science, as much as ever (as much and no

more) in this world, whether free-will be true in it or not.

We can thus ignore the free-will question in psychology. As we said on

p. 452, 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. 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 an actual

science must forever neglect.

=Ethical Importance of the Phenomenon of Effort.=--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 heart-strings 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

it with those deterrent objects there. And hereby he makes himself 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 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 were the one strictly underived and original contribution

which we make to the world!

EPILOGUE.

PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.

=What the Word Metaphysics means.=--In the last chapter we handed the

question of free-will over to 'metaphysics.' It would indeed have been

hasty to settle the question absolutely, inside the limits of

psychology. Let psychology frankly admit that _for her scientific

purposes_ determinism may be _claimed_, and no one can find fault. If,

then, it turn out later that the claim has only a relative purpose, and

may be crossed by counter-claims, the readjustment can be made. Now

ethics makes a counterclaim; and the present writer, for one, has no

hesitation in regarding her claim as the stronger, and in assuming that

our wills are 'free.' For him, then, the deterministic assumption of

psychology is merely provisional and methodological. This is no place to

argue the ethical point; and I only mention the conflict to show that

all these special sciences, marked off for convenience from the

remaining body of truth (cf. p. 1), must hold their assumptions and

results subject to revision in the light of each others' needs. The

forum where they hold discussion is called metaphysics. Metaphysics

means only an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly and

consistently. The special sciences all deal with data that are full of

obscurity and contradiction; but from the point of view of their limited

purposes these defects may be overlooked. Hence the disparaging use of

the name metaphysics which is so common. To a man with a limited purpose

any discussion that is over-subtle for that purpose is branded as

'metaphysical.' A geologist's purposes fall short of understanding Time

itself. A mechanist need not know how action and reaction are possible

at all. A psychologist has enough to do without asking how both he and

the mind which he studies are able to take cognizance of the same outer

world. But it is obvious that problems irrelevant from one standpoint

may be essential from another. And as soon as one's purpose is the

attainment of the maximum of possible insight into the world as a whole,

the metaphysical puzzles become the most urgent ones of all. Psychology

contributes to general philosophy her full share of these; and I propose

in this last chapter to indicate briefly which of them seem the more

important. And first, of the

=Relation of Consciousness to the Brain.=--When psychology is treated as a

natural science (after the fashion in which it has been treated in this

book), 'states of mind' are taken for granted, as data immediately given

in experience; and the working hypothesis (see p. 6) is the mere

empirical law that to the entire state of the brain at any moment one

unique state of mind always 'corresponds.' This does very well till we

begin to be metaphysical and ask ourselves just what we mean by such a

word as 'corresponds.' This notion appears dark in the extreme, the

moment we seek to translate it into something more intimate than mere

parallel variation. Some think they make the notion of it clearer by

calling the mental state and the brain the inner and outer 'aspects,'

respectively, of 'One and the Same Reality.' Others consider the mental

state as the 'reaction' of a unitary being, the Soul, upon the multiple

activities which the brain presents. Others again comminute the mystery

by supposing each brain-cell to be separately conscious, and the

empirically given mental state to be the appearance of all the little

consciousnesses fused into one, just as the 'brain' itself is the

appearance of all the cells together, when looked at from one point of

view.

We may call these three metaphysical attempts the _monistic_, the

_spiritualistic_, and the _atomistic_ theories respectively. Each has

its difficulties, of which it seems to me that those of the

spiritualistic theory are _logically_ much the least grave. But the

spiritualistic theory is quite out of touch with the facts of multiple

consciousness, alternate personality, etc. (pp. 207-214). These lend

themselves more naturally to the atomistic formulation, for it seems

easier to think of a lot of minor consciousnesses now gathering together

into one large mass, and now into several smaller ones, than of a Soul

now reacting totally, now breaking into several disconnected

simultaneous reactions. The localization of brain-functions also makes

for the atomistic view. If in my experience, say of a bell, it is my

occipital lobes which are the condition of its being seen, and my

temporal lobes which are the condition of its being heard, what is more

natural than to say that the former _see_ it and the latter _hear_ it,

and then 'combine their information'? In view of the extreme naturalness

of such a way of representing the well-established fact that the

appearance of the several parts of an object to consciousness at any

moment does depend on as many several parts of the brain being then

active, all such objections as were urged, on pp. 23, 57, and elsewhere,

to the notion that 'parts' of consciousness _can_ 'combine' will be

rejected as far-fetched, unreal, and 'metaphysical' by the atomistic

philosopher. His 'purpose' is to gain a formula which shall unify things

in a natural and easy manner, and for such a purpose the atomistic

theory seems expressly made to his hand.

But the difficulty with the problem of 'correspondence' is not only that

of solving it, it is that of even stating it in elementary terms.

"L'ombre en ce lieu s'amasse, et la nuit est la toute."

Before we can know just what sort of goings-on occur when thought

corresponds to a change in the brain, we must know the _subjects_ of the

goings-on. We must know which sort of mental fact and which sort of

cerebral fact are, so to speak, in immediate juxtaposition. We must

find the minimal mental fact whose being reposes directly on a

brain-fact; and we must similarly find the minimal brain-event which can

have a mental counterpart at all. Between the mental and the physical

minima thus found there will be an immediate relation, the expression of

which, if we had it, would be the elementary psycho-physic law.

Our own formula has escaped the metempiric assumption of psychic atoms

by _taking the entire thought_ (even of a complex object) _as the

minimum with which it deals on the mental_ side, and the entire brain as

the minimum on the physical side. But the 'entire brain' is not a

physical fact at all! It is nothing but our name for the way in which a

billion of molecules arranged in certain positions may affect our sense.

On the principles of the corpuscular or mechanical philosophy, the only

realities are the separate molecules, or at most the cells. Their

aggregation into a 'brain' is a fiction of popular speech. Such a

figment cannot serve as the objectively real counterpart to any psychic

state whatever. Only a genuinely physical fact can so serve, and the

molecular fact is the only genuine physical fact. Whereupon we seem, if

we are to have an elementary psycho-physic law at all, thrust right back

upon something like the mental-atom-theory, for the molecular fact,

being an element of the 'brain,' would seem naturally to correspond, not

to total thoughts, but to elements of thoughts. Thus the real in

psychics seems to 'correspond' to the unreal in physics, and _vice

versa_; and our perplexity is extreme.

=The Relation of States of Mind to their 'Objects.'=--The perplexity is

not diminished when we reflect upon our assumption that states of

consciousness can _know_ (pp. 2-13). From the common-sense point of view

(which is that of all the natural sciences) knowledge is an ultimate

relation between two mutually external entities, the knower and the

known. The world first exists, and then the states of mind; and these

gain a cognizance of the world which gets gradually more and more

complete. But it is hard to carry through this simple dualism, for

idealistic reflections will intrude. Take the states of mind called pure

sensations (so far as such may exist), that for example of _blue_, which

we may get from looking into the zenith on a clear day. Is the blue a

determination of the feeling itself, or of its 'object'? Shall we

describe the experience as a quality of our feeling or as our feeling of

a quality? Ordinary speech vacillates incessantly on this point. The

ambiguous word 'content' has been recently invented instead of 'object,'

to escape a decision; for 'content' suggests something not exactly out

of the feeling, nor yet exactly identical with the feeling, since the

latter remains suggested as the container or vessel. Yet of our feelings

as vessels apart from their content we really have no clear notion

whatever. The fact is that such an experience as _blue_, as it is

immediately given, can only be called by some such neutral name as that

of _phenomenon_. It does not _come_ to us _immediately_ as a relation

between two realities, one mental and one physical. It is only when,

still thinking of it as the _same_ blue (cf. p. 239), we trace relations

between it and other things, that it doubles itself, so to speak, and

develops in two directions; and, taken in connection with some

associates, figures as a physical quality, whilst with others it figures

as a feeling in the mind.

Our non-sensational, or conceptual, states of mind, on the other hand,

seem to obey a different law. They present themselves immediately as

referring beyond themselves. Although they also possess an immediately

given 'content,' they have a 'fringe' beyond it (p. 168), and claim to

'represent' something else than it. The 'blue' we have just spoken of,

for instance, was, substantively considered, a _word_; but it was a word

with a _meaning_. The quality blue was the _object_ of the thought, the

word was its _content_. The mental state, in short, was not

self-sufficient as sensations are, but expressly pointed at something

more in which it meant to terminate.

But the moment when, as in sensations, object and conscious state seem

to be different ways of considering one and the same fact, it becomes

hard to justify our denial that mental states consist of parts. The blue

sky, considered physically, is a sum of mutually external parts; why is

it not such a sum, when considered as a content of sensation?

The only result that is plain from all this is that the relations of the

known and the knower are infinitely complicated, and that a genial,

whole-hearted, popular-science way of formulating them will not suffice.

The only possible path to understanding them lies through metaphysical

subtlety; and Idealism and _Erkenntnisstheorie_ must say their say

before the natural-science assumption that thoughts 'know' things grows

clear.

=The changing character of consciousness= presents another puzzle. We

first assumed conscious 'states' as the units with which psychology

deals, and we said later that they were in constant change. Yet any

state must have a certain duration to be _effective_ at all--a pain

which lasted but a hundredth of a second would practically be no

pain--and the question comes up, how long may a state last and still be

treated as _one_ state? In time-perception for example, if the 'present'

as known (the 'specious present,' as we called it) may be a dozen

seconds long (p. 281), how long need the present as knower be? That is,

what is the minimum duration of the consciousness in which those twelve

seconds can be apprehended as just past, the minimum which can be called

a 'state,' for such a cognitive purpose? Consciousness, as a process in

time, offers the paradoxes which have been found in all continuous

change. There are no 'states' in such a thing, any more than there are

facets in a circle, or places where an arrow 'is' when it flies. The

vertical raised upon the time-line on which (p. 285) we represented the

past to be 'projected' at any given instant of memory, is only an ideal

construction. Yet anything broader than that vertical _is_ not, for the

_actual_ present is only the joint between the past and future and has

no breadth of its own. Where everything is change and process, how can

we talk of 'state'? Yet how can we do without 'states,' in describing

what the vehicles of our knowledge seem to be?