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?

=States of consciousness themselves are not verifiable facts.= But 'worse remains behind.' Neither common-sense, nor psychology so far as it has yet been written, has ever doubted that the states of consciousness which that science studies are immediate data of experience. 'Things' have been doubted, but thoughts and feelings have never been doubted. The outer world, but never the inner world, has been denied. Everyone assumes that we have direct introspective acquaintance with our thinking activity as such, with our consciousness as something inward and contrasted with the outer objects which it knows. Yet I must confess that for my part I cannot feel sure of this conclusion. Whenever I try to become sensible of my thinking activity as such, what I catch is some bodily fact, an impression coming from my brow, or head, or throat, or nose. It seems as if consciousness as an inner activity were rather a _postulate_ than a sensibly given fact, the postulate, namely, of a _knower_ as correlative to all this known; and as if '_scious_ness' might be a better word by which to describe it. But 'sciousness postulated as an hypothesis' is practically a very different thing from 'states of consciousness apprehended with infallible certainty by an inner sense.' For one thing, it throws the question of _who the knower really is_ wide open again, and makes the answer which we gave to it at the end of Chapter XII a mere provisional statement from a popular and prejudiced point of view.

=Conclusion.=--When, then, we talk of 'psychology as a natural science,' we must not assume that that means a sort of psychology that stands at last on solid ground. It means just the reverse; it means a psychology particularly fragile, and into which the waters of metaphysical criticism leak at every joint, a psychology all of whose elementary assumptions and data must be reconsidered in wider connections and translated into other terms. It is, in short, a phrase of diffidence, and not of arrogance; and it is indeed strange to hear people talk triumphantly of 'the New Psychology,' and write 'Histories of Psychology,' when into the real elements and forces which the word covers not the first glimpse of clear insight exists. A string of raw facts; a little gossip and wrangle about opinions; a little classification and generalization on the mere descriptive level; a strong prejudice that we _have_ states of mind, and that our brain conditions them: but not a single law in the sense in which physics shows us laws, not a single proposition from which any consequence can causally be deduced. We don't even know the terms between which the elementary laws would obtain if we had them (p. 464). This is no science, it is only the hope of a science. The matter of a science is with us. Something definite happens when to a certain brain-state a certain 'sciousness' corresponds. A genuine glimpse into what it is would be _the_ scientific achievement, before which all past achievements would pale. But at present psychology is in the condition of physics before Galileo and the laws of motion, of chemistry before Lavoisier and the notion that mass is preserved in all reactions. The Galileo and the Lavoisier of psychology will be famous men indeed when they come, as come they some day surely will, or past successes are no index to the future. When they do come, however, the necessities of the case will make them 'metaphysical.' Meanwhile the best way in which we can facilitate their advent is to understand how great is the darkness in which we grope, and never to forget that the natural-science assumptions with which we started are provisional and revisable things.

THE END.

INDEX.

Abstract ideas, 240, 25; characters, 353; propositions, 354

Abstraction, 251; see _Distraction_

_Accommodation_, of crystalline lens, 32; of ear, 49

Acquaintance, 14

Acquisitiveness, 407

Action, what holds attention determines, 448

After-images, 43-5

AGASSIZ, 132

Alexia, 113

ALLEN, GRANT, 104

Alternating personality, 205 ff.

AMIDON, 132

Analysis, 56, 248, 251, 362

Anger, 374

Aphasia, 108, 113; loss of images in, 309

Apperception, 326

Aqueduct of Silvius, 80

Arachnoid membrane, 84

Arbor vitæ, 86

ARISTOTLE, 318

Articular sensibility, 74

Association, Chapter XVI; the order of our ideas, 253; determined by cerebral laws, 255; is not of ideas, but of things thought of, 255; the elementary principle of, 256; the ultimate cause of is habit, 256; indeterminateness of its results, 258; total recall, 259; partial recall and the law of interest, 261; frequency, recency, vividness, and emotional congruity tend to determine the object recalled, 264; focalized recall or by similarity, 267, 364; voluntary trains of thought, 271; problems, 273

Atomistic theories of consciousness, 462

Attention, Chapter XIII; its relation to interest, 170; its physiological ground, 217; narrowness of field of consciousness, 217; to how many things possible, 219; to simultaneous sight and sound, 220; its varieties, 220; voluntary, 224; involuntary, 220; change necessary to, 226; its relation to genius, 227; physiological conditions of, 228; the sense-organ must be adapted, 229; the idea of the object must be aroused, 232; pedagogic remarks, 236; attention and free-will, 237; what holds attention determines action, 448; volitional effort is effort of attention, 450

Auditory centre in brain, 113

Auditory type of imagination, 306

AUSTEN, Miss, 261

Automaton theory, 10, 101

AZAM, 210

BAHNSEN, 147

BAIN, 145, 367, 370

BERKLEV, 302, 303, 347

BINET, 318, 332

Black, 45-6

Blind Spot, 31

BLIX, 64, 68

Blood-supply, cerebral, 130

Bodily expression, cause of emotions, 375

BRACE, JULIA, 252

Brain, the functions of, Chapter VIII, 91

_Brain_, its connection with mind, 5-7; its relations to outer forces, 9; relations of consciousness to, 462

Brain, structure of, Chapter VII, 78 ff.; vesicles, 78 ff.; dissection of sheep's, 81; how to preserve, 83; functions of, Chapter VIII, 91 ff.

BRIDGMAN, LAURA, 252, 308

BROCA, 109, 113, 115

Broca's convolution, 109

BRODHUN, 46

BROOKS, Prof. W. K., 412

Brutes, reasoning of, 367

Calamus scriptorius, 84

_Canals_, semicircular, 50

CARPENTER, 223, 224

CATTELL, 125, 126, 127

Caudate nucleus, 81, 86

Centres, nerve, 92

Cerebellum, its relation to equilibrium, 76; its anatomy, 79, 84

Cerebral laws, of association, 255

Cerebral process, see _Neural Process_

Cerebrum, see _Brain_, _Hemisphere_

Changing character of consciousness, 152, 466

CHARCOT, 113, 309

Choice, see _Interest_

Coalescence of different sensations into the same 'thing,' 339

_Cochlea_, 51, 52

Cognition, see _Reasoning_

Cold, sensations of, 63 ff.; nerves of, 64

_Color_, 40-3

Commissures, 84

Commissure, middle, 88 ff.; anterior, 88; posterior, 88

Comparison of magnitudes, 342

_Compounding_ of sensations, 23, 43, 57

Compound objects, analysis of, 248

Concatenated acts, dependent on habit, 140

Conceiving, mode of, what is meant by, 354

Conceptions, Chapter XIV; defined, 239; their permanence, 239; different states of mind can mean the same, 239; abstract, universal, and problematic, 240; the thought of 'the same' is not the same thought over again, 243

Conceptual order different from perceptual, 243

Consciousness, stream of, Chapter XI, 151; four characters in, 152; personal, 152; is in constant change, 152, 466; same state of mind never occurs twice, 154; consciousness is continuous, 157; substantive and transitive states of, 160; interested in one part of its object more than another, 170; double consciousness, 206 ff.; narrowness of field of, 217; relations of to brain, 462

Consciousness and Movement, Chapter XXIII; all consciousness is motor, 370

Concomitants, law of varying, 251

Consent, in willing, 452

Continuity of object of consciousness, 157

_Contrast_, 25, 44-5

_Convergence_ of eyeballs, 31, 33

Convolutions, motor, 106

Corpora fimbriata, 86

Corpora quadrigemma, 79, 86, 89

Corpus albicans, 84

Corpus callosum, 81, 84

Corpus striatum, 81, 86, 108

_Cortex_, 11, note

Cortex, localization in, 104; motor region of, 106

_Corti's_ organ, 52

Cramming, 295

Crura of brain, 79, 84, 108

Curiosity, 407

Currents, in nerves, 10

CZERMAK, 70

DARWIN, 388, 389

Deafness, mental, 113

DELAGE, 76

Deliberation, 448

Delusions of insane, 207

Dermal senses, 60 ff.

Determinism and psychology, 461

Decision, five types, 429

Differences, 24; directly felt, 245; not resolvable into composition, 245; inferred, 248

Diffusion of movements, the law of, 371

Dimension, third, 342, 346

Discharge, nervous, 120

Discord, 58

Discrimination, Chapter XV, 59; touch, 62; defined, 244; conditions which favor, 245; sensation of difference, 246; differences inferred, 248; analysis of compound objects, 249; to be easily singled out a quality should already be separately known, 250; dissociation by varying concomitants, 251; practice improves discrimination, 252; of space, 338 See _Difference_

'Disparate' retinal points, 35

Dissection, of sheep's brain, 81

_Distance_, as seen, 39; between members of series, 24; in space, see _Third dimension_

Distraction, 218 ff.

Division of space, 338

DONALDSON, 64

Double consciousness, 206 ff.

Double images, 36

Double personality, 205

Duality of brain, 205

DUMONT, 135

Dura mater, 82

Duration, the primitive object in time-perception, 280; our estimation of short, 281

Ear, 47 ff.

Effort, feeling of, 434; feels like an original force, 442; volitional effort is effort of attention, 450; ethical importance of the phenomena of effort, 458

Ego, see _Self_

Embryological sketch, Chapter VII, 78

Emotion, Chapter XXIV; compared with instincts, 373; varieties of, innumerable, 374; causes of varieties, 375, 381; results from bodily expression, 375; this view not materialistic, 380; the subtler emotions, 384; fear, 385; genesis of reactions, 388

Emotional congruity, determines association, 264

Empirical self, see _Self_

Emulation, 406

End-organs, 10; of touch, 60; of temperature, 64; of pressure, 60; of pain, 67

Environment, 3

Essence of reason, always for subjective interest, 358

Essential characters, in reason, 354

Ethical importance of effort, 458

Exaggerated impulsion, causes an explosive will, 439

EXNER, 123, 281

Experience, 218, 244

Explosive will, from defective inhibition, 437; from exaggerated impulsion, 439

Expression, bodily, cause of emotions, 375

Extensity, primitive to all sensation, 335

Exteriority of objects, 15

External world, 15

Extirpation of higher nerve-centres, 95 ff.

Eye, its anatomy, 28-30

Familiarity, sense of, see _Recognition_

Fear, 385, 406, 407

FECHNER, 21, 229

Feeling of effort, 434

FÉRÉ, 311

FERRIER, 132

Fissure of Rolando, seat of motor incitations, 106

Fissure of Sylvius, 108

Foramen of Monro, 88

Force, original, effort feels like, 442

Forgetting, 300

Fornix, 81, 86, 87, 89

Fovea centralis, 31

FRANKLIN, 121

FRANZ, Dr., 308

Freedom of the will, 237

Free-will and attention, 237; relates solely to effort of attention, 455; insoluble on strictly psychologic grounds, 456; ethical importance of the phenomena of effort, 458

Frequency, determines association, 264

"Fringes" of mental objects, 163 ff.

Frogs' lower centres, 95

Functions of the Brain, Chapter VIII, 91; nervous functions, general idea of, 91

Fusion of mental states, 197, 245, 339

Fusion, of sensations, 23, 43, 57

GALTON, 126, 265, 303, 306

Genius, 227, 327

GOETHE, 146, 157

GOLDSCHEIDER, 11, 64, 68

GOLTZ, 100

GUITEAU, 185

GURNEY, EDMUND, 331, 334

Habit, Chapter X, 134 ff.; has a physical basis, 134; due to plasticity, 135; due to pathways through nerve-centres, 136; effects of, 138; practical use of, 138; depends on sensations not attended to, 141; ethical and pedagogical importance of 142 ff.; habit the ultimate cause of association, 256

HAGENAUER, 386

HALL, ROBERT, 223

Hallucinations, 330 ff.

HAMILTON, 260, 268

Harmony, 58

HARTLEY, 255

Hearing, 47 ff.; centre of, in cortex, 113

Heat-sensations, 63 ff.; nerves of, 64

HELMHOLTZ, 26, 42, 43, 55, 56, 58, 121, 226, 227, 231, 233, 234, 321

Hemispheres, general notion of, 97; chief seat of memory, 98; effects of deprivation of, on frogs, 92; on pigeons, 96

HERBART, 222, 326

HERBARTIAN SCHOOL, 157

HERING, 24, 26

HERZEN, 123, 124

HIPPOCAMPI, 88

HODGSON, 262, 264, 280, 283

HOLBROOK, 297

HORSLEY, 107, 118

HUME, 161, 244

Hunger, sensations of, 69

HUXLEY, 143

Hypnotic conditions, 301

Ideas, the theory of, 154 ff.; never come twice the same, 154; they do not permanently exist, 157; abstract ideas, 240, 251; universal 240; order of ideas by association, 253

'Identical retinal points,' 35

Identity, personal, 201; mutations of, 205 ff.; alternating personality, 205

Ideo-motor action the type of all volition, 432

Illusions, 317 ff., 330

Images, mental, compared with sensations, 14; double, in vision, 36; 'after-images,' 43-5; visual, 302; auditory, 306; motor, 307; tactile, 308

Imagination, Chapter XIX; defined, 302; differs in individuals, 302; Galton's statistics of, 302; visual, 302; auditory, 306; motor, 307; tactile, 308; pathological differences, 308; cerebral process of, 310; not locally distinct from that of sensation, 310

Imitation, 406

Inattention, 218, 236

Increase of stimulus, 20; serial, 24

Infundibulum, 82, 84, 88

Inhibition, defective, causes an Explosive Will, 437

Inhibition of instincts by habits, 399

Insane delusions, 207

Instinct, Chapter XXV; emotions compared with, 373; definition of, 391; every instinct is an impulse, 392; not always blind or invariable, 395; modified by experience, 396; two principles of non-uniformity, 398; man has more than beasts, 398, 406; transitory, 402; of children, 406; fear, 407

Intellect, part played by, in space-perception, 349

Intensity of sensations, 16

Interest, selects certain objects and determines thoughts 170; influence in association, 262

Introspection, 118

JANET, 211, 212, 301

JACKSON, HUGHLINGS, 105, 117

Joints, their sensibility, 74

KADINSKY, 330

Knowledge, theory of, 2, 464, 467; two kinds of, 14

KÖNIG, 46

KRISHABER, 208

Labyrinth, 47, 49-52

LANGE, K., 329

Laws, cerebral, of association, 255

Law, Weber's, 17; --, Fechner's 21; --, of relativity, 24

LAZARUS, 300, 323

Lenticular nucleus, 81

LEWES, 11, 232, 326

Likeness, 243, 364

LINDSAY, Dr., 413

Localization of Functions in the hemispheres, 104 ff.

Localization, Skin, 61

Locations, in environment, 340; serial order of, 341

LOCKE, 244, 302, 357

LOCKEAN SCHOOL, 157

Locomotion, instinct of, 406

LOMBARD, 131

Longituditional fissure, 84

LOTZE, 175

Love, 407

Lower Centres, of frogs and pigeons, 95 ff.

LUDWIG, 130

MACH, 75

Mamillary bodies, 84

Man's intellectual distinction from brutes, 367

MANTEGAZZA, 390

MARTIN, 40, 44, 45, 49, 52, 53, 60, 61, 65, 69

MARTINEAU, 251

Materialism and emotion, 380

MATTEUCI, 120

MAUDSLEY, 138

Measurement, of sensations, 22; of space, 342

'Mediumships,' 212

Medulla oblongata, 84, 108

Memory, Chapter XVIII; hemispheres physical seat of, 98; defined, 287; analysis of the phenomenon of memory, 287 ff.; return of a mental image is not memory, 289; association explains recall and retention, 289; brain-scheme of, 291; conditions of good memory, 292; multiple associations favor, 294; effects of cramming on, 295; how to improve memory, 298; recognition, 299; forgetting, 300; hypnotics, 301

Mental blindness, 112

Mental images, 14

Mental operations, simultaneous, 219

Mental states, cannot fuse, 197; relation of, to their objects, 464

MERKEL, 59, 66

Metaphysics, what the word means, 461

MEYER, G. H., 308, 311

MEYNERT, 105, 117

MILL, JAMES, 196, 276, 289

MILL, J. S., 147, 157

Mimicry, 406

Mind depends on brain conditions, 3-7; states of, their relation to their objects, 464; see _Consciousness_

Modesty, 407

Monistic theories of consciousness, 462

MORGAN, LLOYD, 368

MOSSO, 130, 131

Motion, sensations of, Chapter VI, 70 ff.; feeling of motion over surfaces, 70

Motor aphasia, 108

Motor region of cortex, 106

Motor type of imagination, 307

Movement, consciousness and, II, Chapter I; images of movement, 307; all consciousness is motor, 370

MUNK, 110

MÜNSTERBERG, 23, 311

Muscular sensation, 65 ff.; relations to space, 66, 74; muscular centre in cortex, 106

MUSSEY, DR., 440

NAUNYN, 115

_Nerve-currents_, 9

Nervous discharge, 120

Nerve-endings in the skin, 60; in muscles and tendons, 66-67; Pain, 67 ff.; nerve-centres, 92

Nerves, general functions of, 91 ff.

Neural activity, general conditions of, Chapter IX, 120; nervous discharge, 120

Neural functions, general idea of, 91

Neural process, in habit, 134 ff.; in association, 255 ff.; in memory, 291; in imagination, 310; in perception, 329

Nucleus lenticularis, 81, 108; caudatus, 81, 108

Object, the, of sensation, 13-15; of thought, 154, 163; one part of, more interesting than another, 170; object must change to hold attention, 226; objects as signs and as realities, 345; relation of states of mind to their object, 464

Occipitel lobes, seat of visual centre, 110

Old-fogyism vs. genius, 327

Olfactory lobes, 82, 84

Olivary bodies, 85

Optic nerve, 82, 89

Optic tracts, 84

Original force, effort feels like one, 442

Overtones, 55

Pain, 67 ff.; pain and pleasure as springs of action, 444

PASCAL, 223

Past time, known in a present feeling, 285; the immediate past is a portion of the present duration-block, 280

PAULHAN, 219, 220

Pedagogic remarks on habit, 142; on attention, 236

Peduncles, 84, 85, 86

Perception, Chapter XX; compared with sensation, 312; involves reproductive processes, 312; the perceptive state of mind is not a compound, 313; perception is of definite and probable things, 316; illusory perceptions, 317; physiological process of perception, 329

Perception of Space, Chapter XXI

PEREZ, M., 408

Personal Identity, 201; mutations of, 205 ff.; alternating personality, 205 ff.

Personality, alterations of, 205 ff.

Philosophy, Psychology and, Epilogue, 461

Phosphorus and thought, 132

Pia mater, 82

Pigeons' lower centres, 96

Pitch, 54

Pituitary body, 82, 89

Place, a series of positions, 341

Plasticity, as basis of habit, defined, 135

PLATO, 240

Play, 407

Pleasure, and pain, as springs of action, 444

Psychology and Philosophy, Epilogue, 461

Pons Varolii, 79, 84, 108

Positions, place a series of, 341

Practice, improves discrimination, 252

Present, the present moment, 280

Pressure sense, 60

PREYER, 406

Probability determines what object shall be perceived, 316, 329

Problematic conceptions, 240

Problems, solution of, 272

Projection of sensations, eccentric, 15

Psychology, defined, 1; a natural science, 2; what data it assumes, 2; Psychology and Philosophy, Chapter XXVII

Psycho-physic law, 17, 24, 46, 59, 66, 67

Pugnacity, 406

PURKINJE, 75

Pyramids, 85

Quality, 13, 23, 25, 56

Raehlmann, 349

Rationality, 173

Reaction-time, 120 ff.

Real magnitude, determined by æsthetic and practical interests, 344

Real space, 337

Reason, 254

Reasoning, Chapter XXIII; what it is, 351; involves use of abstract characters, 353; what is meant by an essential character, 354; the essence is always for a subjective interest, 358; two great points in reasoning, 360; sagacity, 362; help from association by similarity, 364; reasoning power of brutes, 367

Recall, 289

Recency, determines association, 264

'Recepts,' 368

Recognition, 299

Recollection, 289 ff.

Redintegration, 264

Reflex acts, defined, 92; reaction-time measures one, 123; concatenated habits are constituted by a chain of, 140

REID, 313

Relations, between objects, 162; feelings of, 162

'_Relativity_ of knowledge,' 24

Reproduction in memory, 289 ff.; voluntary, 271

Resemblance, 243

Retention in memory, 289

Retentiveness, organic, 291; it is unchangeable, 296

Retina, peripheral parts of, act as sentinels, 73

Revival in memory, 289 ff.

RIBOT, 300

RICHET, 410

Rivalry of selves, 186

ROBERTSON, Prof. CROOM, 318

Rolando, fissure of, 106

ROMANES, 128, 322, 367

ROSENTHAL, 11

ROUSSEAU, 148

Rotation, sense of, 75

Sagacity, 362

Sameness, 201, 202

SCHAEFER, 107, 110, 118

SCHIFF, 131

SCHNEIDER, 72, 372, 392

_Science_, natural, 1

SCOTT, Prof., 311

Sea-sickness, accidental origin, 390

Seat of consciousness, 5

Selection, 10; a cardinal function of consciousness, 170

Self, The, Chapter XII; not primary, 176; the empirical self, 176; its constituents, 177; the material self, 177;

the social self, 179; the spiritual self, 181; self-appreciation, 182; self-seeking, bodily, social, and spiritual, 184; rivalry of the mes. 186; their hierarchy, 190; teleology of self-interest, 193; the I, or 'pure ego,' 195; thoughts are not compounded of 'fused' sensations, 196; the soul as a combining medium, 200; the sense of personal identity, 201; explained by identity of function in successive passing thoughts, 203; mutations of the self, 205; insane delusions, 207; alternating personalities, 210; medium-ships, 212; who is the thinker? 215

Self-appreciation, 182

Self-interest, theological uses of, 193; teleological character of, 193

Selves, their rivalry, 186

Semicircular canals, 50

Semicircular canals, their relation to sensations of rotation, 75

Sensations, in General, Chapter II, p. 9; distinguished from perceptions, 12; from images, 14; _first_ things in consciousness, 12; make us acquainted with qualities, 14; their exteriority, 15; intensity of sensations, 16; their measurement, 21; they are not compounds, 23

Sensations, of touch, 60; of skin, 60 ff.; of smell, 69; of pain, 67; of heat, 63; of cold, 63; of hunger, 69; of thirst, 69; of motion, 70; muscular, 65; of taste, 69; of pressure, 60; of joints, 74; of movement through space, 75; of rotation, 75; of translation, 76

Sense of time, see _Time_

Sensory centres in the cortex, 113 ff.

Septum lucidum, 87

Serial order of locations, 341

Shame, 374

Sheep's brain, dissection of, 81

Sight, 28 ff.; see _Vision_

Signs, 40; sensations are, to us of other sensations, whose space-value is held to be more real, 345 ff.

Similarity, association by, 267, 364; see _Likeness_

Size, 40

Skin--senses, 60 ff.; localizing power of, 61; discrimination of points on, 247

Smell, 69; centre of, in cortex, 116

SMITH, T. C., 311

Sociability, 407

Soul, the, as ego or thinker, 196; as a combining medium, 200, 203

Sound, 53-59; images of, 306

Space, Perception of, Chapter XXI; extensity in three dimensions primitive to all sensation, 335; construction of real space, 337; the processes which it involves: (1) Subdivision, 338; (2) Coalescence of different sensible data into one 'thing,' 339; (3) Location in an environment, 342; objects which are signs, and objects which are realities, 345; the third dimension, 346; Berkeley's theory of distance, 346; part played by intellect in space-perception, 349

Space, relation of muscular sense to, 66, 74

SPALDING, 401 ff.

Span of consciousness, 219, 286

Specific energies, 11

Speech, centres of, in cortex, 109; thought possible without it, 169; see _Aphasia_

SPENCER, 103, 387, 390

Spinal cord, conduction of pain by, 68; centre of defensive movements, 93

Spiritual substance, see _Soul_

Spiritualistic theories of consciousness, 462

Spontaneous trains of thought, 257; examples, 257 ff., 271

STARR, 107, 113, 115

STEINTHAL, 327

Stream of Consciousness, Chapter XI, 151

STRICKER, 307

Subdivision of space, 338

Substantive states of mind, 160

Succession _vs._ duration, 280; not known by successive feelings, 285

Summation of stimuli, 128

Surfaces, feeling of motion over, 70

Tactile centre in cortex, 116

Tactile images, 308

TAINE, 208

Taste, 69; centre of, in cortex, 116

Teleological character of consciousness, 4; of self-interest, 193

Temperature-sense, 63 ff.

Terminal organs, 10, 30, 52

Thalami, 80, 86, 89, 108

Thermometry, cerebral, 131

'Thing,' coalescence of sensations to form the same, 339

Thinking principle, see _Soul_

Third dimension of space, 346

Thirst, sensations of, 69

THOMSON, Dr. ALLEN, 129

Thought, the 'Topic' of, 167; stream of, 151; can be carried on in any terms, 167; unity of, 196; spontaneous trains of, 257; the entire thought the minimum, 464

'Timbre,' 55

Time, sense of, Chapter XVII; begins with duration, 280; no sense of empty time, 281; compared with perception of space, 282; discrete flow of time, 282; long intervals conceived symbolically, 283; we measure duration by events that succeed in it, 283; variations in our estimations of its length, 283; cerebral processes of, 286

Touch, 60 ff.; centre of, in cortex, 116; images of, 308

Transcendental self or ego, 196

Transitive states of mind, 160

Translation, sense of, 76

Trapezium, 85

TURNER, Dr. J. E., 440

Tympanum, 48

Types of decision, 429

Unity of the passing thought, 196

Universal conceptions, 240

URBANTSCHITCH, 25

Valve of Vieussens, 80, 86

Variability of the emotions, 381

Varying concomitants, law of disassociation by, 251

Ventricles, 79 ff.

VIERORDT, 71

Vision, 28 ff.; binocular, 33-9; of solidity, 37

Visual centre of cortex, 110, 115

Visual imagination, 302

Visualizing power, 302

Vividness, determines association, 264

Volition, see _Will_

VOLKMANN, 285

Voluminousness, primitive, of sensations, 335

Voluntary acts, defined, 92; voluntary attention, 224; voluntary trains of thought, 271

Weber's law, 17, 24, 46, 59

Weber's law--weight, 66; pain, 67

Weight, sensibility to, 66 ff.

WERNICKE, 109, 113, 115

WESLEY, 223

WHEATSTONE, 347

WIGAN, 300

Will, Chapter XXVI; voluntary acts, 415; they are secondary performances, 415; no third kind of idea is called for, 418; the motor-cue, 420; ideo-motor action, 432; action after deliberation, 428; five types of decision, 429; feeling of effort, 434; healthiness of will, 435; defects of, 436; the explosive will: (1) from defective inhibition, 437; (2) from exaggerated impulsion, 439; the obstructed will, 441; effort feels like an original force, 442; pleasure and pain as springs of action, 444; what holds attention determines action, 448; will is a relation between the mind and its ideas, 449; volitional effort is effort of attention, 450; free-will, 455; ethical importance of effort, 458

Willing terminates with the prevalence of the idea, 449

WUNDT, 11, 18, 25, 58, 122, 123, 125, 127, 220, 281

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In the present volume I have given so much extension to the details of 'Sensation' that I have obeyed custom and put that subject first, although by no means persuaded that such order intrinsically is the best. I feel now (when it is too late for the change to be made) that the chapters on the Production of Motion, on Instinct, and on Emotion ought, for purposes of teaching, to follow immediately upon that on Habit, and that the chapter on Reasoning ought to come in very early, perhaps immediately after that upon the Self. I advise teachers to adopt this modified order, in spite of the fact that with the change of place of 'Reasoning' there ought properly to go a slight amount of re-writing.

[2] The subject may feel _pain_, however, in this experiment; and it must be admitted that nerve-fibres of every description, terminal organs as well, are to some degree excitable by mechanical violence and by the electric current.

[3] Thus the optic nerve-fibres are traced to the occipital lobes, the olfactory tracts go to the lower part of the temporal lobe (hippocampal convolution), the auditory nerve-fibres pass first to the cerebellum, and probably from thence to the upper part of the temporal lobe. These anatomical terms used in this chapter will be explained later. The _cortex_ is the gray surface of the convolutions.

[4] Vorlesungen über Menschen u. Thierseele, Lecture VII.

[5] In other words, _S_ standing for the sensation in general, and _d_ for its noticeable increment, we have the equation _d__S_ = const. The increment of stimulus which produces _d__S_ (call it _d__R_) meanwhile varies. Fechner calls it the 'differential threshold'; and as its _relative_ value to _R_ is always the same, we have the equation _d__R_/_R_ = const.

[6] Beiträge zur exp. Psychol., Heft 3, p. 4.

[7] I borrow it from Ziehen: Leitfaden d. Physiologischen Psychologie, 1891, p. 36, who quotes Hering's version of it.

[8] Successive ones also; but I consider simultaneous ones only, for simplicity's sake.

[9] The extreme case is where green light and red, _e.g._ light falling simultaneously on the retina, give a sensation of yellow. But I abstract from this because it is not certain that the incoming currents here affect different fibres of the optic nerve.

[10] The student can easily verify the coarser features of the eye's anatomy upon a bullock's eye, which any butcher will furnish. Clean it first from fat and muscles and study its shape, etc., and then (following Golding Bird's method) make an incision with a pointed scalpel into the sclerotic half an inch from the edge of the cornea, so that the black choroid membrane comes into view. Next with one blade of a pair of scissors inserted into this aperature, cut through sclerotic, choroid, and retina (avoid wounding the membrane of the vitreous body!) all round the eyeball parallel to the cornea's edge.

The eyeball is thus divided into two parts, the anterior one containing the iris, lens, vitreous body, etc., whilst the posterior one contains most of the retina. The two parts can be separated by immersing the eyeball in water, cornea downwards, and simply pulling off the portion to which the optic nerve is attached. Floating this detached posterior cap in water, the delicate retina will be seen spread out over the choroid (which is partly iridescent in the ox tribe); and by turning the cup inside out, and working under water with a camel's-hair brush, the vessels and nerves of the eyeball may be detected.

The anterior part of the eyeball can then be attacked. Seize with forceps on each side the edge of the sclerotic and choroid (not including the retina), raise the eye with the forceps thus applied and shake it gently till the vitreous body, lens, capsule, ligament, etc., drop out by their weight, and separate from the iris, ciliary processes, cornea, and sclerotic, which remains in the forceps. Examine these latter parts, and get a view of the ciliary muscle which appears as a white line, when with camel's-hair brush and scalpel the choroid membrane is detached from the sclerotic as far forward as it will go. Turning to the parts that cling to the vitreous body observe the clear ring around the lens, and radiating outside of it the marks made by the ciliary processes before they were torn away from its suspensory ligament. A fine capillary tube may now be used to insufflate the clear ring, just below the letter _p_ in Fig. 3, and thus to reveal the suspensory ligament itself.

All these parts can be seen in section in a frozen eye or one hardened in alcohol.

[11] This vertical partition is introduced into stereoscopes, which otherwise would give us three pictures instead of one.

[12] The simplest form of stereoscope is two tin tubes about one and one-half inches calibre, dead black inside and (for normal eyes) ten inches long. Close each end with paper not too opaque, on which an inch-long thick black line is drawn. The tubes can be looked through, one by each eye, and held either parallel or with their farther ends converging. When properly rotated, their images will show every variety of fusion and non-fusion, and stereoscopic effect.

[13] Martin: The Human Body, p. 530.

[14] Ibid.

[15] The ordinary mixing of _pigments_ is not an addition, but rather, as Helmholtz has shown, a subtraction, of lights. To _add_ one color to another we must either by appropriate glasses throw differently colored beams upon the same reflecting surface; or we must let the eye look at one color through an inclined plate of glass beneath which it lies, whilst the upper surface of the glass reflects into the same eye another color placed alongside--the two lights then mix on the retina; or, finally, we must let the differently colored lights fall in succession upon the retina, so fast that the second is there before the impression made by the first has died away. This is best done by looking at a rapidly rotating disk whose sectors are of the several colors to be mixed.

[16] Martin: _op. cit._

[17] Martin, pp. 525-8.

[18] In teaching the anatomy of the ear, great assistance will be yielded by the admirable model made by Dr. Auzoux, 56 Rue de Vaugirard, Paris, described in the catalogue of the firm as "No. 21--_Oreille, temporal de_ 60 cm., nouvelle édition," etc.

[19] This description is abridged from Martin's 'Human Body'.

[20] Martin: _op. cit._

[21] Martin: _op. cit._

[22] Martin: _op. cit._

[23] Martin: _op. cit._

[24] Martin: _op. cit._

[25] Martin: _op. cit._, with omissions.

[26] Martin: _op. cit._

[27] Vierteljahrsch. für wiss. Philos., II. 377.

[28] This chapter will be understood as a mere sketch for beginners. Models will be found of assistance. The best is the 'Cerveau de Texture de Grande Dimension,' made by Auzoux, 56 Rue de Vaugirard, Paris. It is a wonderful work of art, and costs 300 francs. M. Jules Talrich of No. 97 Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris, makes a series of five large plaster models, which I have found very useful for class-room purposes. They cost 350 francs, and are far better than any German models which I have seen.

[29] All the places in the brain at which the cavities come through are filled in during life by prolongations of the membrane called _pia mater_, carrying rich plexuses of blood-vessels in their folds.

[30] The Physiology of Mind, p. 155.

[31] J. Bahnsen: 'Beiträge zu Charakterologie' (1867), vol. I. p. 209.

[32] De l'Intelligence, 3me édition (1878), vol. II. p. 461, note.

[33] Some of the evidence for this medium's supernormal powers is given in The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. VI. p. 436, and in the last Part of vol. VII. (1892).

[34] Mental Physiol., § 124. The oft-cited case of soldiers in battle not perceiving that they are wounded is of an analogous sort.

[35] Physiol. Optik, p. 741.

[36] I refer to a recency of a few hours. Mr. Galton found that experiences from boyhood and youth were more likely to be suggested by words seen at random than experiences of later years. See his highly interesting account of experiments in his Inquiries into Human Faculty, pp. 191-203.

[37] Miss M. W. Calkins (Philosophical Review, I. 389, 1892) points out that the persistent feature of the going thought, on which the association in cases of similarity hinges, is by no means always so slight as to warrant the term 'focalized.' "If the sight of the whole breakfast-room be followed by the visual image of yesterday's breakfast-table, with the same setting and in the same surroundings, the association is practically total," and yet the case is one of similarity. For Miss Calkins, accordingly, the more important distinction is that between what she calls _desistent_ and _persistent_ association. In 'desistent' association all parts of the going thought fade out and are replaced. In 'persistent' association some of them remain, and form a bond of similarity between the mind's successive objects; but only where this bond is extremely delicate (as in the case of an abstract relation or quality) is there need to call the persistent process 'focalized.' I must concede the justice of Miss Calkins's criticism, and think her new pair of terms a useful contribution. Wundt's division of associations into the two classes of _external_ and _internal_ is congruent with Miss Calkins's division. Things associated internally must have some element in common; and Miss Calkins's word 'persistent' suggests how this may cerebrally come to pass. 'Desistent,' on the other hand, suggests the process by which the successive ideas become external to each other or preserve no inner tie.

[38] A common figure-alphabet is this:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 t n m r l sh g f b s d j k v p c ch c z g qu

[39] In Mind, IX. 206, M. Binet points out the fact that what is fallaciously inferred is always an object of some other sense than the 'this.' 'Optical illusions' are generally errors of touch and muscular sensibility, and the fallaciously perceived object and the experiences which correct it are both tactile in these cases.

[40] Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 324.

[41] M. Lazarus: Das Leben d. Seele (1857), II. p. 32. In the ordinary hearing of speech half the words we seem to hear are supplied out of our own head. A language with which we are familiar is understood even when spoken in low tones and far off. An unfamiliar language is unintelligible under these conditions. The 'ideas' for interpreting the sounds by not being ready-made in our minds, as they are in our familiar mother-tongue, do not start up at so faint a cue.

[42] Einleitung in die Psychologie u. Sprachwissenschaft (1881), p. 171.

[43] The great maxim in pedagogy is to knit every new piece of knowledge on to a preëxisting curiosity--i.e., to assimilate its matter in some way to what is already known. Hence the advantage of "comparing all that is far off and foreign to something that is near home, of making the unknown plain by the example of the known, and of connecting all the instruction with the personal experience of the pupil.... If the teacher is to explain the distance of the sun from the earth, let him ask ... 'If anyone there in the sun fired off a cannon straight at you, what should you do?' 'Get out of the way,' would be the answer. 'No need of that,' the teacher might reply. 'You may quietly go to sleep in your room, and get up again, you may wait till your confirmation-day, you may learn a trade, and grow as old as I am,--_then_ only will the cannon-ball be getting near, _then_ you may jump to one side! See, so great as that is the sun's distance!'" (K. Lange, Ueber Apperception, 1879, p. 76.)

[44] The writer of the present work is Agent of the Census for America, and will thankfully receive accounts of cases of hallucination of vision, hearing, etc., of which the reader may have knowledge.

[45] Cf. Raehlmann in Zeitschrift für Psychol. und Physiol. der Sinnesorgane, II. 79.

[46] Readers brought up on Popular Science may think that the molecular structure of things is their real essence in an absolute sense, and that water is H-O-H more deeply and truly than it is a solvent of sugar or a slaker of thirst. Not a whit! It is _all_ of these things with equal reality, and the only reason why _for the chemist_ it is H-O-H primarily, and only secondarily the other things, is that _for his purpose_ of laboratory analysis and synthesis, and inclusion in the science which treats of compositions and decompositions, the H-O-H aspect of it is the more important one to bear in mind.

[47] Mental Evolution in Man, p. 74.

[48] Origin of the Emotions (N. Y. ed.), p. 292.

[49] Spalding, Macmillan's Magazine, Feb. 1873, p. 287.

[50] _Ibid._, p. 289.

[51] Psychologie de l'Enfant, p. 72.

[52] Der Menschliche Wille, p. 224.

[53] Deutsches Archiv f. Klin. Medicin, xxii. 321.

[54] Medicinische Psychologie, p. 293.

[55] This _volitional_ effort pure and simple must be carefully distinguished from the _muscular_ effort with which it is usually confounded. The latter consists of all those peripheral feelings to which a muscular 'exertion' may give rise. These feelings, whenever they are massive and the body is not 'fresh,' are rather disagreeable, especially when accompanied by stopped breath, congested head, bruised skin of fingers, toes, or shoulders, and strained joints. And it is only _as thus disagreeable_ that the mind must make its _volitional_ effort in stably representing their reality and consequently bringing it about. That they happen to be made real by muscular activity is a purely accidental circumstance. There are instances where the fiat demands great volitional effort though the muscular exertion be insignificant, e.g. the getting out of bed and bathing one's self on a cold morning. Again, a soldier standing still to be fired at expects disagreeable sensations from his muscular passivity. The action of his will, in sustaining the expectation, is identical with that required for a painful muscular effort. What is hard for both is _facing an idea as real_.