The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

All tlie 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 chat 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 repreresented good. The class * goods ' contains many more generally influential motives to action than the class * pleasants.' Pleasures often attract us only because we deem them goods. Mr. Spencer, e.g., urges us to court pleasures for their influence upon health, which comes to us as a good. But almost as little as under the form of pleasures do our acts invariably appear to us under the form of goods. All diseased impulses and pathological fixed ideas are instances to the contrary. It is the very badness of the act that gives it then its vertiginous fascination. Eemove the prohibition, and the attraction stops. In my university days a student threw himself from an upper entry window of one of the college buildings and was nearly killed. Another

student, a friend of my own, had to pass the window daily in coming and going from his room, and experienced a dreadful temptation to imitate the deed. Being a Catholic, he told his director, who said, ' All right! if you must, you must,' and added, ' Go ahead and do it,' thereby instantly quenching his desire. This director knew how to minister to a mind diseased. But we need not go to minds diseased for examples of the occasional tempting-power of simple badness and unpleasantness as such. Every one who has a wound or hurt anywhere, a sore tooth, e.g., will ever and anon press it just to bring out the pain. If we are near a new sort of stink, we must sniff it again just to verify once more how bad it is. This very day I have been repeating over and over to myself a verbal jingle whose mawkish silliness was the secret of its haunting power. I loathed yet could not banish it.

Believers in the pleasure-and-pain theory must thus, if they are candid, make large exceptions in the application of their creed. Action from ' fixed ideas ' is accordingly a terrible stumbling-block to the candid Professor Bain. Ideas have in his psychology no impulsive but only a * guiding ' function, whilst " The proper stimulus of the will, namely, some variety of pleasure and pain, is needed to give the impetus. . . . The intellectual link is not sufficient for causing the deed to rise at the beck of the idea (except in case of an 'idee fixe') ;" but " should any pleasure spring up or be continued, by performing an action that we clearly conceive, the causation is then complete; both the directing and the moving powers are present." *

Pleasures and pains are for Professor Bain the * genuivie impulses of the will.' f "Without an antecedent of pleasurable or painful feeling — actual or ideal, primary or derivative — the will cannot be stimulated. Through * Emotion and Will, p. 352. But even Bain's own description belies his formula, for the idea appears as the ' moving ' and the pleasure as the ' directing ' force. all the disguises that wrap up what we call motives, something of one or other of these two grand conditions can be detected." *

Accordingly, where Professor Bain finds an exception to this rule, he refuses to call the phenomenon a * genuinely voluntary impulse.' The exceptions, he admits, * are those furnished by never-dying spontaneity, habits, and fixed ideas.' t Fixed ideas * traverse the proper course of volition.' t " Disinterested impulses are wholly distinct from the attainment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. . . . The theory of disinterested action, in the only form that I can conceive it, supposes that the action of the will and the attainment of happiness do not square throughout. "§

Sympathy " has this in common with the Fixed Idea, that it clashes with the regular outgoings of the will in favor of our pleasures."! Prof. Bain thus admits all the essential facts. Pleasure and pain are motives of only part of our activity. But he prefers to give to that part of the activity exclusively which these feelings prompt the name of ' regular outgoings ' and * genuine impulses ' of the will, 1 and to treat all the rest as mere paradoxes and anomalies, of which nothing rational can be said. This amounts to taking one species of a genus, calling it alone by the generic name, and ordering the other co-ordinate species to find what names they may. At bottom this is only verbal play. How much more conducive to clearness and insight it is to take the genus

* springs of action ' and treat it as a whole ; and then to distinguish within it the species ' pleasure and pain ' from whatever other species may be found ! There is, it is true, a complication in the relation of pleasure to action, which partly excuses those who make it the exclusive spur. This complication deserves some notice at our hands. An impulse which discharges itself immediately is generally quite neutral as regards pleasure or pain — the breath-

ing impulse, for example. If such an impulse is arrested, however, by an extrinsic force, a great feeling of uneasiness is produced — for instance, the dyspnoea of asthma. And in proportion as the arresting force is then overcome, rdie/ acrues — as when we draw breath again after the asthma subsides. The relief is a pleasure and the uneasiness a pain ; and thus it happens that round all our impulses, merely as such, there twine, as it were, secondary possibilities of pleasant and painful feeling, involved in the manner in which the act is allowed to occur. These pleasures and pains of achievement ^ discharge^ or fruition exist, no matter what the original spring of action be. We are glad when we have successfully got ourselves out of a danger, though the thought of the gladness was surely not what suggested to us to escape. To have compassed the steps towards a proposed sensual indulgence also makes us glad, and this gladness is a pleasure additional to the pleasure originally proposed. On the other hand, we are chagrined and displeased when any activity, however instigated, is hindered whilst in process of actual discharge. We are ' uneasy ' till the discharge starts up again. And this is just as true when the action is neutral, or has nothing but pain in view as its result, as when it was undertaken for pleasure's express sake. The moth is probably as annoyed if hindered from getting into the lamp-flame as the roue is if interrupted in his debauch ; and we are chagrined if prevented from doing some quite unimportant act which would have given us no noticeable pleasure if done, merely because the prevention itself is disagreeable.

Let us now call the pleasure for the sake of which the act may be done the pursued pleasure. It follows that, even when no pleasure is pursued by an act, the act itself may be the pleasantest line of conduct when once the impulse has begun, on account of the incidental pleasure which then attends its successful achievement and the pain which would come of interruption. A pleasant act and an act pursuing a pleasure are in themselves, however, two perfectly distinct conceptions, though they coalesce in one concrete phenomenon whenever a pleasure is deliberately pursued. I cannot help thinking that it is the confusion of pursued pleasure

with mere pleasure of achievement which makes the pleasuretheory of action so plausible to the ordinary mind. We feel an impulse, no matter whence derived; we proceed to act ; if hindered, we feel displeasure ; and if successful, relief. Action in the lin^ of the present impulse is always for the time being the pleasant course ; and the ordinary hedonist expresses this fact by saying that we act for the sake of the pleasantness involved. But who does not see that for this sort of pleasure to be possible, the impulse m,u8t he there already as an independent faxit ? The pleasure of successful performance is the result of the impulse, not its cause. You cannot have your pleasure of achievement unless you have managed to get your impulse under headway beforehand by some previous means.

It is true that on special occasions (so complex is the human mind) the pleasure of achievement may itself become a pursued pleasure; and these cases form another point on which the pleasure-theory is apt to rally. Take a foot-ball game or a fox-hunt. Who in cold blood wants the fox for its own sake, or cares whether the ball be at this goal or that ? We know, however, by experience, that if we can once rouse a certain impulsive excitement in ourselves, whether to overtake the fox, or to get the ball to one particular goal, the successful venting of it over the counteracting checks will fill us with exceeding joy. We therefore get ourselves deliberately and artificially into the hot impulsive state. It takes the presence of various instinct-arousing conditions to excite it ; but little by little, once we are in the field, it reaches its paroxysm ; and we reap the reward of our exertions in that pleasure of successful achievement which, far more than the dead fox or the goal-got ball, was the object we originally pursued. So it often is with duties. Lots of actions are done with heaviness all through, and not till they are completed does pleasure emerge, in the joy of being done with them. Like Hamlet we say of each such successive task,

and then we often add to the original impulse that set ue* on, this additional one, that " we shall feel so glad wheo well through with it," that thought also having its impulsive spur. But because a pleasure of achievement can thus become a pursued pleasure upon occasion, it does not follow that everywhere and always that pleasure must be what is pursued. This, however, is what the pleasure-philosophers seem to suppose. As well might they suppose, because no steamer can go to sea without incidentally consuming coal, and because some steamers may occasionally go to sea to try their coal, that therefore no steamer can go to sea for any other motive than that of coal-consumption.^

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, f

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 interest- * How much clearer Hume's head was than that of his disciples' I " It has been proved beyond all controversy that even the passions commonly esteemed selfish carry the Mind beyond self directly to the object ; that though the satisfaction of these passions gives us enjoyment, yet the prospect of this enjoyment is not the cause of the passions but, on the contrary, the passion is antecedent to the enjoyment, and without the former the latter could never possibly exist," etc. (Essay on the Different Species of Philoso phy, § 1, note near the end.)

t In favor of the view in the text, one may consult H. Sidgwick, Meth ods of Ethics, book i. chap, iv; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, bk. ni. chap. I. p. 179; Carpenter, Mental Physiol., chap vi ; J. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, part ii, bk. i, chap. ii. i, and bk. ii, branch i. chap. I. i. § 3. Against it see Leslie Stephen, Science of Ethics, chap. ii. § II ; H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, §§ 9-15; D. G. Thompson. System of Psychology, part ix, and Mind, vi. 62. Also BaiL, Senses and Intellect, 738-44 , Emotions and Will- 436.

ing * 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. Ifc 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 y namely, laith 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 ! 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 ih^ 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 vnlling 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.

In St. Yitus' 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

* This sentence is written from the autliors own consciousness. But many persons say that where they disbelieve in the effects ensuing, as in the case of the table, they cannot will it. They " cannot exert a volition that a table should move." This personal difference may be partly verbal. Different people may attach different connotntions to the word 'will.' But I incline to think that we differ psychologically as well. Wben one knows that he has no power, one's desire of a thing is called a wish and not a will. The sense of impotence inhibits the volition. Only by abstracting from the thought of the impossibility am I able to imagine strongly the table sliding over the floor, to make the bodily ' effort ' which I do, and to will it to come towards me. It may be that some people are unable to perform this abstraction, and that the image of the table stationary on the floor inhibits the contradictory image of its moving, which is the object to be willed.

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 jtware 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."^

We thus find that we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition ivhen we ash 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 fat ; and it is a mere physiological incident that w^hen 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 f and it is the same with many of

* A normal palsy occurs during sleep. We will all sorts of motions in our dreams, but seldom perform any of them. In nightmare we become conscious of the non-performance, and make a muscular ' effort.' This feems then to occur in a restricted way. limiting itself to the occlusion of the glottis and producing the respiratory anxiety which wakes us up. 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.* (Compare above, p. 321.)

Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of ivill.f 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 * Both resolves and beliefs have of course immediate motor consequences of a quasi-emotional sort, changes of breathing, of attitude, internal speech movements, etc,; but these movements are not the objects resolved on or believed. The movements in common volition are the objects willed,

f This volitional effort pure and simple must be carefully distinguished from the muscular effort with which it is usually confounded. The latter consists of all those peripheral feelings to which a muscular ' exertion ' may give rise. These feelings, whenever they are massive and the body is not * fresh, ' are rather disagreeable, especially when accompanied by stopped breath, congested head, bruised skin of fingers, toes, or shoulders, and strained joints. And it is only as thus disagreeable that the mind must make its volitional effort in stably representing their reality and consequently bringing it about. That they happen to be made real by muscular activity is a purely accidental circumstance. A soldier standing still to be fired at expects disagreeable sensations from his muscular passivity. The action of his will, in sustaining the expectation, is identical with that required for a painful muscular effort. What is hard for both is facing an idea, as real.

Where much muscular effort is not needed or where the ' freshness ' is very great, the volitional effort is not required to sustain the idea of movement, which comes then and stays in virtue of association's simpler laws. More commonly, however, muscular effort involves volitional effort as well. Exhausted with fatigue and wet and watching, the sailor on a wreck throws himself down to rest. But hardly are his limbs fairly relaxed, when the order ' To the pumps ! ' again sounds in his ears. Shall he, can he, obey it ? Is it not better just to let his aching body lie, and let the ship go down if she will? So he lies on, till, with a desperate heave of the will, at last he staggers to his legs, and to his task again. Again, there are instances where the fiat demands great volitional effort though the muscular exertion be insignitJcant, e.g., the getting out of bed and bathing one's self on a cold morning.

weje 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 ofi'er 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. " ZToec tihi erit janua letiy'' 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 possesion of the field of his thoughts, infallibly produces its own motor e£fects. 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 itJlUs 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