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it does not follow that everywhere and always that pleasure must be
what is pursued. This, however, is what the pleasure-philosophers
seem to suppose. As well might they suppose, because no steamer
can go to sea without incidentally consuming coal, and because
some steamers may occasionally go to sea to try their coal, that
therefore no steamer can go to sea for any other motive than that of
coal-consumption.[488]
As we need not act for the sake of gaining the pleasure of
achievement, so neither need we act for the sake of escaping the
uneasiness of arrest. This uneasiness is altogether due to the fact
that the act is already tending to occur on other grounds. And these
original grounds are what impel to its continuance, even though the
uneasiness of the arrest may upon occasion add to their impulsive
power.
To conclude, I am far from denying the exceeding prominence and
importance of the part which pleasures and pains, both felt and
represented, play in the motivation of our conduct. But I must insist
that it is no exclusive part, and that co-ordinately with these mental
objects innumerable others have an exactly similar impulsive and
inhibitive power.[489]
If one must have a single name for the condition upon which the
impulsive and inhibitive quality of objects depends, one had better
call it their interest. 'The interesting' is a title which covers not only
the pleasant and the painful, but also the morbidly fascinating, the
tediously haunting, and even the simply habitual, inasmuch as the
attention usually travels on habitual lines, and what-we-attend-to
and what-interests-us are synonymous terms. It seems as if we
ought to look for the secret of an idea's impulsiveness, not in any
peculiar relations which it may have with paths of motor discharge,
—for all ideas have relations with some such paths,—but rather in a
preliminary phenomenon, the urgency, namely, with which it is able
to compel attention and dominate in consciousness. Let it once so
dominate, let no other ideas succeed in displacing it, and whatever
motor effects belong to it by nature will inevitably occur—its
impulsion, in short, will be given to boot, and will manifest itself as a
matter of course. This is what we have seen in instinct, in emotion,
in common ideo-motor action, in hypnotic suggestion, in morbid
impulsion, and in voluntas invita,—the impelling idea is simply the
one which possesses the attention. It is the same where pleasure
and pain are the motor spurs—they drive other thoughts from
consciousness at the same time that they instigate their own
characteristic 'volitional' effects. And this is also what happens at the
moment of the fiat, in all the five types of 'decision' which we have
described. In short, one does not see any case in which the
steadfast occupancy of consciousness does not appear to be the
prime condition of impulsive power. It is still more obviously the
prime condition of inhibitive power. What checks our impulses is the
mere thinking of reasons to the contrary—it is their bare presence to
the mind which gives the veto, and makes acts, otherwise seductive,
impossible to perform. If we could only forget our scruples, our
doubts, our fears, what exultant energy we should for a while
display!

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

In closing in, therefore, after all these preliminaries, upon the more
intimate nature of the volitional process, we find ourselves driven
more and more exclusively to consider the conditions which make
ideas prevail in the mind. With the prevalence, once there as a fact,
of the motive idea the psychology of volition properly stops. The
movements which ensue are exclusively physiological phenomena,
following according to physiological laws upon the neural events to
which the idea corresponds. The willing terminates with the
prevalence of the idea; and whether the act then follows or not is a
matter quite immaterial, so far as the willing itself goes. I will to
write, and the act follows. I will to sneeze, and it does not. I will that
the distant table slide over the floor towards me; it also does not. My
willing representation can no more instigate my sneezing-centre
than it can instigate the table to activity. But in both cases it is as
true and good willing as it was when I willed to write.[490] In a
word, volition is a psychic or moral fact pure and simple, and is
absolutely completed when the stable state of the idea is there. The
supervention of motion is a supernumerary phenomenon depending
on executive ganglia whose function lies outside the mind.
In St. Vitus' dance, in locomotor ataxy, the representation of a
movement and the consent to it take place normally. But the inferior
executive centres are deranged, and although the ideas discharge
them, they do not discharge them so as to reproduce the precise
sensations anticipated. In aphasia the patient has an image of
certain words which he wishes to utter, but when he opens his
mouth he hears himself making quite unintended sounds. This may
fill him with rage and despair—which passions only show how intact
his will remains. Paralysis only goes a step farther. The associated
mechanism is not only deranged but altogether broken through. The
volition occurs, but the hand remains as still as the table. The
paralytic is made aware of this by the absence of the expected
change in his afferent sensations. He tries harder, i.e., he mentally
frames the sensation of muscular 'effort,' with consent that it shall
occur. It does so: he frowns, he heaves his chest, he clinches his
other fist, but the palsied arm lies passive as before.[491]
We thus find that we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition
when we ask by what process it is that the thought of any given
object comes to prevail stably in the mind. Where thoughts prevail
without effort, we have sufficiently studied in the several chapters on
sensation, association, and attention, the laws of their advent before
consciousness and of their stay. We will not go over that ground
again, for we know that interest and association are the words, let
their worth be what it may, on which our explanations must perforce
rely. Where, on the other hand, the prevalence of the thought is
accompanied by the phenomenon of effort, the case is much less
clear. Already in the chapter on attention we postponed the final
consideration of voluntary attention with effort to a later place. We
have now brought things to a point at which we see that attention
with effort is all that any case of volition implies. The essential
achievement of the will, in short, when it is most 'voluntary,' is to
attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind. The so-
doing is the fiat; and it is a mere physiological incident that when
the object is thus attended to, immediate motor consequences
should ensue. A resolve, whose contemplated motor consequences
are not to ensue until some possibly far distant future condition shall
have been fulfilled, involves all the psychic elements of a motor fiat
except the word 'now;' and it is the same with many of our purely
theoretic beliefs. We saw in effect in the appropriate chapter, how in
the last resort belief means only a peculiar sort of occupancy of the
mind, and relation to the self felt in the thing believed; and we know
in the case of many beliefs how constant an effort of the attention is
required to keep them in this situation and protect them from
displacement by contradictory ideas.[492] (Compare above, p. 321.)
Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will.[493]
Every reader must know by his own experience that this is so, for
every reader must have felt some fiery passion's grasp. What
constitutes the difficulty for a man laboring under an unwise passion
of acting as if the passion were unwise? Certainly there is no
physical difficulty. It is as easy physically to avoid a fight as to begin
one, to pocket one's money as to squander it on one's cupidities, to
walk away from as towards a coquette's door. The difficulty is
mental; it is that of getting the idea of the wise action to stay before
our mind at all. When any strong emotional state whatever is upon
us the tendency is for no images but such as are congruous with it
to come up. If others by chance offer themselves, they are instantly
smothered and crowded out. If we be joyous, we cannot keep
thinking of those uncertainties and risks of failure which abound
upon our path; if lugubrious, we cannot think of new triumphs,
travels, loves, and joys; nor if vengeful, of our oppressor's
community of nature with ourselves. The cooling advice which we
get from others when the fever-fit is on us is the most jarring and
exasperating thing in life. Reply we cannot, so we get angry; for by
a sort of self-preserving instinct which our passion has, it feels that
these chill objects, if they once but gain a lodgment, will work and
work until they have frozen the very vital spark from out of all our
mood and brought our airy castles in ruin to the ground. Such is the
inevitable effect of reasonable ideas over others—if they can once
get a quiet hearing; and passion's cue accordingly is always and
everywhere to prevent their still small voice from being heard at all.
"Let me not think of that! Don't speak to me of that!" This is the
sudden cry of all those who in a passion perceive some sobering
considerations about to check them in mid-career. "Hæc tibi erit
janua leti," we feel. There is something so icy in this cold-water
bath, something which seems so hostile to the movement of our life,
so purely negative, in Reason, when she lays her corpse-like finger
on our heart and says, "Halt! give up! leave off! go back! sit down!"
that it is no wonder that to most men the steadying influence seems,
for the time being, a very minister of death.
The strong-willed man, however, is the man who hears the still small
voice unflinchingly, and who, when the death-bringing consideration
comes, looks at its face, consents to its presence, clings to it, affirms
it, and holds it fast, in spite of the host of exciting mental images
which rise in revolt against it and would expel it from the mind.
Sustained in this way by a resolute effort of attention, the difficult
object erelong begins to call up its own congeners and associates
and ends by changing the disposition of the man's consciousness
altogether. And with his consciousness, his action changes, for the
new object, once stably in possession of the field of his thoughts,
infallibly produces its own motor effects. The difficulty lies in the
gaining possession of that field. Though the spontaneous drift of
thought is all the other way, the attention must be kept strained on
that one object until at last it grows, so as to maintain itself before
the mind with ease. This strain of the attention is the fundamental
act of will. And the will's work is in most cases practically ended
when the bare presence to our thought of the naturally unwelcome
object has been secured. For the mysterious tie between the
thought and the motor centres next comes into play, and, in a way
which we cannot even guess at, the obedience of the bodily organs
follows as a matter of course.
In all this one sees how the immediate point of application of the
volitional effort lies exclusively in the mental world. The whole drama
is a mental drama. The whole difficulty is a mental difficulty, a
difficulty with an object of our thought. If I may use the word idea
without suggesting associationist or Herbartian fables, I will say that
it is an idea to which our will applies itself, an idea which if we let it
go would slip away, but which we will not let go. Consent to the
idea's undivided presence, this is effort's sole achievement. Its only
function is to get this feeling of consent into the mind. And for this
there is but one way. The idea to be consented to must be kept from
flickering and going out. It must be held steadily before the mind
until it fills the mind. Such filling of the mind by an idea, with its
congruous associates, is consent to the idea and to the fact which
the idea represents. If the idea be that, or include that, of a bodily
movement of our own, then we call the consent thus laboriously
gained a motor volition. For Nature here 'backs' us instantaneously
and follows up our inward willingness by outward changes on her
own part. She does this in no other instance. Pity she should not
have been more generous, nor made a world whose other parts
were as immediately subject to our will!

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

said that it usually came when the right conception of the case was
found. Where, however, the right conception is an anti-inpulsive one,
the whole intellectual ingenuity of the man usually goes to work to
crowd it out of sight, and to find names for the emergency, by the
help of which the dispositions of the moment may sound sanctified,
and sloth or passion may reign unchecked. How many excuses does
the drunkard find when each new temptation comes! It is a new
brand of liquor which the interests of intellectual culture in such
matters oblige him to test; moreover it is poured out and it is sin to
waste it; or others are drinking and it would be churlishness to
refuse; or it is but to enable him to sleep, or just to get through this
job of work; or it isn't drinking, it is because he feels so cold; or it is
Christmas-day; or it is a means of stimulating him to make a more
powerful resolution in favor of abstinence than any he has hitherto
made; or it is just this once, and once doesn't count, etc., etc., ad
libitum—it is, in fact, anything you like except being a drunkard.
That is the conception that will not stay before the poor soul's
attention. But if he once gets able to pick out that way of conceiving,
from all the other possible ways of conceiving the various
opportunities which occur, if through thick and thin he holds to it
that this is being a drunkard and is nothing else, he is not likely to
remain one long. The effort by which he succeeds in keeping the
right name unwaveringly present to his mind proves to be his saving
moral act.[494]
Everywhere then the function of the effort is the same: to keep
affirming and adopting a thought which, if left to itself, would slip
away. It may be cold and flat when the spontaneous mental drift is
towards excitement, or great and arduous when the spontaneous
drift is towards repose. In the one case the effort has to inhibit an
explosive, in the other to arouse an obstructed will. The exhausted
sailor on a wreck has a will which is obstructed. One of his ideas is
that of his sore hands, of the nameless exhaustion of his whole
frame which the act of farther pumping involves, and of the
deliciousness of sinking into sleep. The other is that of the hungry
sea ingulfing him. "Rather the aching toil!" he says; and it becomes
reality then, in spite of the inhibiting influence of the relatively
luxurious sensations which he gets from lying still. But exactly similar
in form would be his consent to lie and sleep. Often it is the thought
of sleep and what leads to it which is the hard one to keep before
the mind. If a patient afflicted with insomnia can only control the
whirling chase of his thoughts so far as to think of nothing at all
(which can be done), or so far as to imagine one letter after another
of a verse of scripture or poetry spelt slowly and monotonously out,
it is almost certain that here, too, specific bodily effects will follow,
and that sleep will come. The trouble is to keep the mind upon a
train of objects naturally so insipid. To sustain a representation, to
think, is, in short, the only moral act, for the impulsive and the
obstructed, for sane and lunatics alike. Most maniacs know their
thoughts to be crazy, but find them too pressing to be withstood.
Compared with them the sane truths are so deadly sober, so
cadaverous, that the lunatic cannot bear to look them in the face
and say, "Let these alone be my reality!" But with sufficient effort, as
Dr. Wigan says,

"Such a man can for a time wind himself up, as it were, and
determine that the notions of the disordered brain shall not be
manifested. Many instances are on record similar to that told by
Pinel, where an inmate of the Bicêtre, having stood a long
cross-examination, and given every mark of restored reason,
signed his name to the paper authorizing his discharge 'Jesus
Christ,' and then went off into all the vagaries connected with
that delusion. In the phraseology of the gentleman whose case
is related in an early part of this [Wigan's] work he had 'held
himself tight' during the examination in order to attain his
object; this once accomplished he 'let himself down' again, and,
if even conscious of his delusion, could not control it. I have
observed with such persons that it requires a considerable time
to wind themselves up to the pitch of complete self-control, that
the effort is a painful tension of the mind.... When thrown off
their guard by any accidental remark or worn out by the length
of the examination, they let themselves go, and cannot gather
themselves up again without preparation. Lord Erskine relates
the story of a man who brought an action against Dr. Munro for
confining him without cause. He underwent the most rigid
examination by the counsel for the defendant without
discovering any appearance of insanity, till a gentleman asked
him about a princess with whom he corresponded in cherry-
juice, and he became instantly insane."[495]
To sum it all up in a word, the terminus of the psychological process
in volition, the point to which the will is directly applied, is always an
idea. There are at all times some ideas from which we shy away like
frightened horses the moment we get a glimpse of their forbidding
profile upon the threshold of our thought. The only resistance which
our will can possibly experience is the resistance which such an idea
offers to being attended to at all. To attend to it is the volitional act,
and the only inward volitional act which we ever perform.

I have put the thing in this ultra-simple way because I want more
than anything else to emphasize the fact that volition is primarily a
relation, not between our Self and extra-mental matter (as many
philosophers still maintain) but between our Self and our own states
of mind. But when, a short while ago, I spoke of the filling of the
mind with an idea as being equivalent to consent to the idea's
object, I said something which the reader doubtless questioned at
the time, and which certainly now demands some qualification ere
we pass beyond.
It is unqualifiedly true that if any thought do fill the mind exclusively,
such filling is consent. The thought, for that time at any rate, carries
the man and his will with it. But it is not true that the thought need
fill the mind exclusively for consent to be there; for we often consent
to things whilst thinking of other things, even of hostile things; and
we saw in fact that precisely what distinguishes our 'fifth type' of
decision from the other types (see p. 534) is just this coexistence
with the triumphant thought of other thoughts which would inhibit it
but for the effort which makes it prevail. The effort to attend is
therefore only a part of what the word 'will' covers; it covers also the
effort to consent to something to which our attention is not quite
complete. Often, when an object has gained our attention
exclusively, and its motor results are just on the point of setting in, it
seems as if the sense of their imminent irrevocability were enough of
itself to start up the inhibitory ideas and to make us pause. Then we
need a new stroke of effort to break down the sudden hesitation
which seizes upon us, and to persevere. So that although attention
is the first and fundamental thing in volition, express consent to the
reality of what is attended to is often an additional and quite distinct
phenomenon involved.
The reader's own consciousness tells him of course just what these
words of mine denote. And I freely confess that I am impotent to
carry the analysis of the matter any farther, or to explain in other
terms of what this consent consists. It seems a subjective
experience sui generis, which we can designate but not define. We
stand here exactly where we did in the case of belief. When an idea
stings us in a certain way, makes as it were a certain electric
connection with our self, we believe that it is a reality. When it stings
us in another way, makes another connection with our Self, we say,
let it be a reality. To the word 'is' and to the words 'let it be' there
correspond peculiar attitudes of consciousness which it is vain to
seek to explain. The indicative and the imperative moods are as
much ultimate categories of thinking as they are of grammar. The
'quality of reality' which these moods attach to things is not like
other qualities. It is a relation to our life. It means our adoption of
the things, our caring for them, our standing by them. This at least
is what it practically means for us; what it may mean beyond that
we do not know. And the transition from merely considering an
object as possible, to deciding or willing it to be real; the change
from the fluctuating to the stable personal attitude concerning it;
from the 'don't care' state of mind to that in which 'we mean
business,' is one of the most familiar things in life. We can partly
enumerate its conditions; and we can partly trace its consequences,
especially the momentous one that when the mental object is a
movement of our own body, it realizes itself outwardly when the
mental change in question has occurred. But the change itself as a
subjective phenomenon is something which we can translate into no
simpler terms.

THE QUESTION OF 'FREE-WILL.'

Especially must we, when talking about it, rid our mind of the
fabulous warfare of separate agents called 'ideas.' The brain-
processes may be agents, and the thought as such may be an
agent. But what the ordinary psychologies call 'ideas' are nothing but
parts of the total object of representation. All that is before the mind
at once, no matter how complex a system of things and relations it
may be, is one object for the thought. Thus, 'A-and-B-and-their-
mutual-incompatibility-and-the-fact-that-only-one-can-be-true-or-
can-become-real-notwithstanding-the-probability-or-desirability-of-
both' may be such a complex object; and where the thought is
deliberative its object has always some such form as this. When,
now, we pass from deliberation to decision, that total object
undergoes a change. We either dismiss A altogether and its relations
to B, and think of B exclusively; or after thinking of both as
possibilities, we next think that A is impossible, and that B is or
forthwith shall be real. In either case a new object is before our
thought; and where effort exists, it is where the change from the
first object to the second one is hard. Our thought seems to turn in
this case like a heavy door on rusty hinges; only, so far as the effort
feels spontaneous, it turns, not as if by some one helping, but as if
by an inward activity, born for the occasion, of its own.
The psychologists who discussed 'the muscular sense' at the
international congress at Paris in 1889 agreed at the end that they
needed to come to a better understanding in regard to this
appearance of internal activity at the moment when a decision is
made. M. Fouillée, in an article which I find more interesting and
suggestive than coherent or conclusive,[496] seems to resolve our
sense of activity into that of our very existence as thinking entities.
At least so I translate his words.[497] But we saw in Chapter X how
hard it is to lay a verifying finger plainly upon the thinking process as
such, and to distinguish it from certain objects of the stream. M.
Fouillée admits this; but I do not think he fully realizes how strong
would be the position of a man who should suggest (see Vol. I. p.
301) that the feeling of moral activity itself which accompanies the
advent of certain 'objects' before the mind is nothing but certain
other objects,—constrictions, namely, in the brows, eyes, throat, and
breathing apparatus, present then, but absent from other pulses of
subjective change. Were this the truth, then a part, at any rate, of
the activity of which we become aware in effort would seem merely
to be that of our body; and many thinkers would probably thereupon
conclude that this 'settles the claims' of inner activity, and dismisses
the whole notion of such a thing as a superfluity in psychological
science.
I cannot see my way to so extreme a view; even although I must
repeat the confession made on pp. 296-7 of Vol. I, that I do not fully
understand how we come to our unshakable belief that thinking
exists as a special kind of immaterial process alongside of the
material processes of the world. It is certain, however, that only by
postulating such thinking do we make things currently intelligible;
and it is certain that no psychologist has as yet denied the fact of
thinking, the utmost that has been denied being its dynamic power.
But if we postulate the fact of the thinking at all, I believe that we
must postulate its power as well; nor do I see how we can rightly
equalize its power with its mere existence, and say (as M. Fouillée
seems to say) that for the thought-process to go on at all is an
activity, and an activity everywhere the same; for certain steps
forward in this process seem prima facie to be passive, and other
steps (as where an object comes with effort) seem prima facie to be
active in a supreme degree. If we admit, therefore, that our
thoughts exist, we ought to admit that they exist after the fashion in
which they appear, as things, namely, that supervene upon each
other, sometimes with effort and sometimes with ease; the only
questions being, is the effort where it exists a fixed function of the
object, which the latter imposes on the thought? or is it such an
independent 'variable' that with a constant object more or less of it
may be made?
It certainly appears to us indeterminate, and as if, even with an
unchanging object, we might make more or less, as we choose. If it
be really indeterminate, our future acts are ambiguous or
unpredestinate: in common parlance, our wills are free. If the
amount of effort be not indeterminate, but be related in a fixed
manner to the objects themselves, in such wise that whatever object
at any time fills our consciousness was from eternity bound to fill it
then and there, and compel from us the exact effort, neither more
nor less, which we bestow upon it,—then our wills are not free, and
all our acts are foreordained. The question of fact in the free-will
controversy is thus extremely simple. It relates solely to the amount
of effort of attention or consent which we can at any time put forth.
Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the
object, or are they not? Now, as I just said, it seems as if the effort
were an independent variable, as if we might exert more or less of it
in any given case. When a man has let his thoughts go for days and
weeks until at last they culminate in some particularly dirty or
cowardly or cruel act, it is hard to persuade him, in the midst of his
remorse, that he might not have reined them in; hard to make him
believe that this whole goodly universe (which his act so jars upon)
required and exacted it of him at that fatal moment, and from
eternity made aught else impossible. But, on the other hand, there is
the certainty that all his effortless volitions are resultants of interests
and associations whose strength and sequence are mechanically
determined by the structure of that physical mass, his brain; and the
general continuity of things and the monistic conception of the world
may lead one irresistibly to postulate that a little fact like effort can
form no real exception to the overwhelming reign of deterministic
law. Even in effortless volition we have the consciousness of the
alternative being also possible. This is surely a delusion here; why is
it not a delusion everywhere?
My own belief is that the question of free-will is insoluble on strictly
psychologic grounds. After a certain amount of effort of attention
has been given to an idea, it is manifestly impossible to tell whether
either more or less of it might have been given or not. To tell that,
we should have to ascend to the antecedents of the effort, and
defining them with mathematical exactitude, prove, by laws of which
we have not at present even an inkling, that the only amount of
sequent effort which could possibly comport with them was the
precise amount which actually came. Measurements, whether of
psychic or of neural quantities, and deductive reasonings such as
this method of proof implies, will surely be forever beyond human
reach. No serious psychologist or physiologist will venture even to
suggest a notion of how they might be practically made. We are
thrown back therefore upon the crude evidences of introspection on
the one hand, with all its liabilities to deception, and, on the other
hand, upon a priori postulates and probabilities. He who loves to
balance nice doubts need be in no hurry to decide the point. Like
Mephistopheles to Faust, he can say to himself, "dazu hast du noch
eine lange Frist," for from generation to generation the reasons
adduced on both sides will grow more voluminous, and the
discussion more refined. But if our speculative delight be less keen,
if the love of a parti pris outweighs that of keeping questions open,
or if, as a French philosopher of genius says, "l'amour de la vie qui
s'indigne de tant de discours," awakens in us, craving the sense of
either peace or power,—then, taking the risk of error on our head,
we must project upon one of the alternative views the attribute of
reality for us; we must so fill our mind with the idea of it that it
becomes our settled creed. The present writer does this for the
alternative of freedom, but since the grounds of his opinion are
ethical rather than psychological, he prefers to exclude them from
the present book.[498]

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

question. The most that any argument can do for determinism is to
make it a clear and seductive conception, which a man is foolish not
to espouse, so long as he stands by the great scientific postulate
that the world must be one unbroken fact, and that prediction of all
things without exception must be ideally, even if not actually,
possible. It is a moral postulate about the Universe, the postulate
that what ought to be can be, and that bad acts cannot be fated,
but that good ones must be possible in their place, which would lead
one to espouse the contrary view. But when scientific and moral
postulates war thus with each other and objective proof is not to be
had, the only course is voluntary choice, for scepticism itself, if
systematic, is also voluntary choice. If, meanwhile, the will be
undetermined, it would seem only fitting that the belief in its
indetermination should be voluntarily chosen from amongst other
possible beliefs. Freedom's first deed should be to affirm itself. We
ought never to hope for any other method of getting at the truth if
indeterminism be a fact. Doubt of this particular truth will therefore
probably be open to us to the end of time, and the utmost that a
believer in free-will can ever do will be to show that the deterministic
arguments are not coercive. That they are seductive, I am the last to
deny; nor do I deny that effort may be needed to keep the faith in
freedom, when they press upon it, upright in the mind.
There is a fatalistic argument for determinism, however, which is
radically vicious. When a man has let himself go time after time, he
easily becomes impressed with the enormously preponderating
influence of circumstances, hereditary habits, and temporary bodily
dispositions over what might seem a spontaneity born for the
occasion. "All is fate," he then says; "all is resultant of what pre-
exists. Even if the moment seems original, it is but the instable
molecules passively tumbling in their preappointed way. It is
hopeless to resist the drift, vain to look for any new force coming in;
and less, perhaps, than anywhere else under the sun is there
anything really mine in the decisions which I make." This is really no
argument for simple determinism. There runs throughout it the
sense of a force which might make things otherwise from one
moment to another, if it were only strong enough to breast the tide.
A person who feels the impotence of free effort in this way has the
acutest notion of what is meant by it, and of its possible
independent power. How else could he be so conscious of its
absence and of that of its effects? But genuine determinism occupies
a totally different ground; not the impotence but the unthinkability
of free-will is what it affirms. It admits something phenomenal called
free effort, which seems to breast the tide, but it claims this as a
portion of the tide. The variations of the effort cannot be
independent, it says; they cannot originate ex nihilo, or come from a
fourth dimension; they are mathematically fixed functions of the
ideas themselves, which are the tide. Fatalism, which conceives of
effort clearly enough as an independent variable that might come
from a fourth dimension if it would come, but that does not come, is
a very dubious ally for determinism. It strongly imagines that very
possibility which determinism denies.
But what, quite as much as the inconceivability of absolutely
independent variables, persuades modern men of science that their
efforts must be predetermined, is the continuity of the latter with
other phenomena whose predetermination no one doubts. Decisions
with effort merge so gradually into those without it that it is not easy
to say where the limit lies. Decisions without effort merge again into
ideo-motor, and these into reflex acts; so that the temptation is
almost irresistible to throw the formula which covers so many cases
over absolutely all. Where there is effort just as where there is none,
the ideas themselves which furnish the matter of deliberation are
brought before the mind by the machinery of association. And this
machinery is essentially a system of arcs and paths, a reflex system,
whether effort be amongst its incidents or not. The reflex way is,
after all, the universal way of conceiving the business. The feeling of
ease is a passive result of the way in which the thoughts unwind
themselves. Why is not the feeling of effort the same? Professor
Lipps, in his admirably clear deterministic statement, so far from
admitting that the feeling of effort testifies to an increment of force
exerted, explains it as a sign that force is lost. We speak of effort,
according to him, whenever a force expends itself (wholly or partly)
in neutralizing another force, and so fails of its own possible outward
effect. The outward effect of the antagonistic force, however, also
fails in corresponding measure, "so that there is no effort without
counter-effort,... and effort and counter-effort signify only that
causes are mutually robbing each other of effectiveness."[499] Where
the forces are ideas, both sets of them, strictly speaking, are the
seat of effort—both those which tend to explode, and those which
tend to check them. We, however, call the more abundant mass of
ideas ourselves; and, talking of its effort as our effort, and of that of
the smaller mass of ideas as the resistance,[500] we say that our
effort sometimes overcomes the resistances offered by the inertias
of an obstructed, and sometimes those presented by the impulsions
of an explosive, will. Really both effort and resistance are ours, and
the identification of our self with one of these factors is an illusion
and a trick of speech. I do not see how anyone can fail (especially
when the mythologic dynamism of separate 'ideas,' which Professor
Lipps cleaves to, is translated into that of brain-processes) to
recognize the fascinating simplicity of some such view as his. Nor do
I see why for scientific purposes one need give it up even if
indeterminate amounts of effort really do occur. Before their
indeterminism, science simply stops. She can abstract from it
altogether, then; for in the impulses and inhibitions with which the
effort has to cope there is already a larger field of uniformity than
she can ever practically cultivate. Her prevision will never foretell,
even if the effort be completely predestinate, the actual way in
which each individual emergency is resolved. Psychology will be
Psychology,[501] and Science Science, as much as ever (as much and
no more) in this world, whether free will be true in it or not. Science,
however, must be constantly reminded that her purposes are not the
only purposes, and that the order of uniform causation which she
has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped
in a wider order, on which she has no claims at all.
We can therefore leave the free-will question altogether out of our
account. As we said in Chapter VI (vol. I. p. 453), the operation of
free effort, if it existed, could only be to hold some one ideal object,
or part of an object, a little longer or a little more intensely before
the mind. Amongst the alternatives which present themselves as
genuine possibles, it would thus make one effective.[502] And
although such quickening of one idea might be morally and
historically momentous, yet, if considered dynamically, it would be
an operation amongst those physiological infinitesimals which
calculation must forever neglect.
But whilst eliminating the question about the amount of our effort as
one which psychology will never have a practical call to decide, I
must say one word about the extraordinarily intimate and important
character which the phenomenon of effort assumes in our own eyes
as individual men. Of course we measure ourselves by many
standards. Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even
our good luck, are things which warm our heart and make us feel
ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things, and able
to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the amount of
effort which we can put forth. Those are, after all, but effects,
products, and reflections of the outer world within. But the effort
seems to belong to an altogether different realm, as if it were the
substantive thing which we are, and those were but externals which
we carry. If the 'searching of our heart and reins' be the purpose of
this human drama, then what is sought seems to be what effort we
can make. He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can
make much is a hero. The huge world that girdles us about puts all
sorts of questions to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways. Some of
the tests we meet by actions that are easy, and some of the
questions we answer in articulately formulated words. But the
deepest question that is ever asked admits of no reply but the dumb
turning of the will and tightening of our heartstrings as we say, "Yes,
I will even have it so!" When a dreadful object is presented, or when
life as a whole turns up its dark abysses to our view, then the
worthless ones among us lose their hold on the situation altogether,
and either escape from its difficulties by averting their attention, or if
they cannot do that, collapse into yielding masses of plaintiveness
and fear. The effort required for facing and consenting to such
objects is beyond their power to make. But the heroic mind does
differently. To it, too, the objects are sinister and dreadful,
unwelcome, incompatible with wished-for things. But it can face
them if necessary, without for that losing its hold upon the rest of
life. The world thus finds in the heroic man its worthy match and
mate; and the effort which he is able to put forth to hold himself
erect and keep his heart unshaken is the direct measure of his worth
and function in the game of human life. He can stand this Universe.
He can meet it and keep up his faith in it in presence of those same
features which lay his weaker brethren low. He can still find a zest in
it, not by 'ostrich-like forgetfulness,' but by pure inward willingness
to face the world with those deterrent objects there. And hereby he
becomes one of the masters and the lords of life. He must be
counted with henceforth; he forms a part of human destiny. Neither
in the theoretic nor in the practical sphere do we care for, or go for
help to, those who have no head for risks, or sense for living on the
perilous edge. Our religious life lies more, our practical life lies less,
than it used to, on the perilous edge. But just as our courage is so
often a reflex of another's courage, so our faith is apt to be, as Max
Müller somewhere says, a faith in some one else's faith. We draw
new life from the heroic example. The prophet has drunk more
deeply than anyone of the cup of bitterness, but his countenance is
so unshaken and he speaks such mighty words of cheer that his will
becomes our will, and our life is kindled at his own.
Thus not only our morality but our religion, so far as the latter is
deliberate, depend on the effort which we can make. "Will you or
won't you have it so?" is the most probing question we are ever
asked; we are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest
as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most
practical, things. We answer by consents or non-consents and not by
words. What wonder that these dumb responses should seem our
deepest organs of communication with the nature of things! What
wonder if the effort demanded by them be the measure of our worth
as men! What wonder if the amount which we accord of it be the
one strictly underived and original contribution which we make to
the world!

THE EDUCATION OF THE WILL.

The education of the will may be taken in a broader or a narrower
sense. In the broader sense, it means the whole of one's training to
moral and prudential conduct, and of one's learning to adapt means
to ends, involving the 'association of ideas,' in all its varieties and
complications, together with the power of inhibiting impulses
irrelevant to the ends desired, and of initiating movements
contributory thereto. It is the acquisition of these latter powers
which I mean by the education of the will in the narrower sense.
And it is in this sense alone that it is worth while to treat the matter
here.[503]
Since a willed movement is a movement preceded by an idea of
itself, the problem of the will's education is the problem of how the
idea of a movement can arouse the movement itself. This, as we
have seen, is a secondary kind of process; for framed as we are, we
can have no a priori idea of a movement, no idea of a movement
which we have not already performed. Before the idea can be
generated, the movement must have occurred in a blind,
unexpected way, and left its idea behind. Reflex, instinctive, or
random execution of a movement must, in other words, precede its
voluntary execution. Reflex and instinctive movements have already
been considered sufficiently for the purposes of this book. 'Random'
movements are mentioned so as to include quasi-accidental reflexes
from inner causes, or movements possibly arising from such
overflow of nutrition in special centres as Prof. Bain postulates in his
explanation of those 'spontaneous discharges' by which he sets such
great store in his derivation of the voluntary life.[504]
Now how can the sensory process which a movement has previously
produced, discharge, when excited again, into the centre for the
movement itself? On the movement's original occurrence the motor
discharge came first and the sensory process second; now in the
voluntary repetition the sensory process (excited in weak or
'ideational' form) comes first, and the motor discharge comes
second. To tell how this comes to pass would be to answer the
problem of the education of the will in physiological terms. Evidently
the problem is that of the formation of new paths; and the only
thing to do is to make hypotheses, till we find some which seem to
cover all the facts.
How is a fresh path ever formed? All paths are paths of discharge,
and the discharge always takes place in the direction of least
resistance, whether the cell which discharges be 'motor' or 'sensory.'
The connate paths of least resistance are the paths of instinctive
reaction; and I submit as my first hypothesis that these paths all run
one way, that is from 'sensory' cells into 'motor' cells and from motor
cells into muscles, without ever taking the reverse direction. A motor
cell, for example, never awakens a sensory cell directly, but only
through the incoming current caused by the bodily movements to
which its discharge gives rise. And a sensory cell always discharges
or normally tends to discharge towards the motor region. Let this
direction be called the 'forward' direction. I call the law an
hypothesis, but really it is an indubitable truth. No impression or idea
of eye, ear, or skin comes to us without occasioning a movement,
even though the movement be no more than the accommodation of
the sense-organ; and all our trains of sensation and sensational
imagery have their terms alternated and interpenetrated with motor
processes, of most of which we practically are unconscious. Another
way of stating the rule is to say that, primarily or connately, all
currents through the brain run towards the Rolandic region, and that
there they run out, and never return upon themselves. From this
point of view the distinction of sensory and motor cells has no
fundamental significance. All cells are motor; we simply call those of
the Rolandic region, those nearest the mouth of the funnel, the
motor cells par excellence.
A corollary of this law is that 'sensory' cells do not awaken each
other connately; that is, that no one sensible property of things has
any tendency, in advance of experience, to awaken in us the idea of
any other sensible properties which in the nature of things may go
with it. There is no a priori calling up of one 'idea' by another; the
only a priori couplings are of ideas with movements. All suggestions
of one sensible fact by another take place by secondary paths which
experience has formed.
 Fig. 87.

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

ideally reduced to the fewest possible terms. A stimulus reaching the
sense-organ awakens the sensory cell, S; this by the connate or
instinctive path discharges the motor cell, M, which makes the muscle
contract; and the contraction arouses the second sensory cell, K,
which may be the organ either of a 'resident' or 'kinæsthetic,' or of a
'remote,' sensation. (See above, p. 488.) This cell K again discharges
into M. If this were the entire nervous mechanism, the movement,
once begun, would be self-maintaining, and would stop only when the
parts were exhausted. And this, according to M. Pierre Janet, is what
actually happens in catalepsy. A cataleptic patient is anæsthetic,
speechless, motionless. Consciousness, so far as we can judge, is
abolished. Nevertheless the limbs will retain whatever position is
impressed upon them from without, and retain it so long that if it be a
strained and unnatural position, the phenomenon is regarded by
Charcot as one of the few conclusive tests against hypnotic subjects
shamming, since hypnotics can be made cataleptic, and then keep
their limbs outstretched for a length of time quite unattainable by the
waking will. M. Janet thinks that in all these cases the outlying
ideational processes in the brain are temporarily thrown out of gear.
The kinæsthetic sensation of the raised arm, for example, is produced
in the patient when the operator raises the arm, this sensation
discharges into the motor cell, which through the muscle reproduces
the sensation, etc., the currents running in this closed circle until they
grow so weak, by exhaustion of the parts, that the member slowly
drops. We may call this circle from the muscle to K, from K to M, and
from M to the muscle again, the 'motor circle.' We should all be
cataleptics and never stop a muscular contraction once begun, were it
not that other processes simultaneously going on inhibit the
contraction. Inhibition is therefore not an occasional accident; it is an
essential and unremitting element of our cerebral life. It is interesting
to note that Dr. Mercier, by a different path of reasoning, is also led to
conclude that we owe to outside inhibitions exclusively our power to
arrest a movement once begun.[506]
One great inhibitor of the discharge of K into M seems to be the
painful or otherwise displeasing quality of the sensation itself of K;
and conversely, when this sensation is distinctly pleasant, that fact
tends to further K's discharge into M, and to keep the primordial
motor circle agoing. Tremendous as the part is which pleasure and
pain play in our psychic life, we must confess that absolutely nothing
is known of their cerebral conditions. It is hard to imagine them as
having special centres; it is harder still to invent peculiar forms of
process in each and every centre, to which these feelings may be
due. And let one try as one will to represent the cerebral activity in
exclusively mechanical terms, I, for one, find it quite impossible to
enumerate what seem to be the facts and yet to make no mention of
the psychic side which they possess. However it be with other
drainage currents and discharges, the drainage currents and
discharges of the brain are not purely physical facts. They are psycho-
physical facts, and the spiritual quality of them seems a
codeterminant of their mechanical effectiveness. If the mechanical
activities in a cell, as they increase, give pleasure, they seem to
increase all the more rapidly for that fact; if they give displeasure, the
displeasure seems to damp the activities. The psychic side of the
phenomenon thus seems, somewhat like the applause or hissing at a
spectacle, to be an encouraging or adverse comment on what the
machinery brings forth. The soul presents nothing herself; creates
nothing; is at the mercy of the material forces for all possibilities; but
amongst these possibilities she selects; and by reinforcing one and
checking others, she figures not as an 'epiphenomenon,' but as
something from which the play gets moral support. I shall therefore
never hesitate to invoke the efficacy of the conscious comment,
where no strictly mechanical reason appears why a current escaping
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