WILL. 445

ever action leads to them, so the tlioughts of pleasures and
pains take rank amongst the thouglits which have most
impulsive and inhihitive power. The precise relation
wliich these thoughts hold to other thoughts is tluis a
matter demanding some aitention.

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 inhi-
bition 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 whicli, when once we have begun
to taste them, make it all but ol)ligatory to keep up the
activity to which they are due. So widespread and search-
ing is this influence of ])leasures and pains upon our move-
ments that a premature pliiloso})]iy has decided tliat 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 manifesta-
tions 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
tliey yieM ? In all these cases the movements are dis-
charged fatally by the vis a tergn which the stiinulua
exerts upon a nervous system framed to re8])ond in just
that way. The objocta of our rago, hne, or terror, the
occasions of our tears and smiles, whetiier they bo jiresent
to our seuHcs, or whetiier they be merely representod in
idea, have this peculiar sort of injpulsive jmwer. The



446 PBTOHOLOaT.

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
^hat. Feelings of pleasure and pain have it, and percep-
tions and imaginations of fact have it, but neither have it
exclusively or peculiarly. It is of the essence of all con-
sciousness (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 them-
selves 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 Emo-
tion have shown us that their name is legion; and with
Jiis 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 arti-
ficially 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 refer-
ence 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 aw 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



'WILL. 447

because at the moment we cannot help it ; our nervous
systems are so sluiped that they overflow in just that way;
and for many of our idle or purely 'nervous' and fidgety
performances we can assign absolutely no irasan 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 comi)ulsion on him, he can think of no excuse, and so
says yes, cursing himself the while for what he does, lie
is unusually siii compos who does not every week of his
life fall into some such blundering act as this. Sucli in-
stances 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 repre-
sented (jood. The class ' goods ' contains many more gen-
erally influential motives to action than the class ' pleas-
ants.' 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
nre 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. Anotiier student, a friend of my own, had
to i)a.sri the window daily in coming and going from his
room, and experienced a dreadful temptation to imitate
tlie deed. B«Mng a Catholic, he told his director, who said,
'All right ! if you must, you must,' and added, '(Jo ahead
and do it,' thereby instantly quenching liis desire. 'J'iiis
director knew how to minister to a mind diseased. Hut
we need ni»t go to minds diseased for examples of the occa-
sional U-mpting-power of simple badness and unpleasant-
ness iXA such. Kvery one who has a wound or hurt any-
where, a Bore tooth, e.g., will ever and anon press it just to
bring out the pain. If we are near a new sort of stink, w6
must sniff it again just to verify once more how bad it ia



448 PBTGMOLOOY.

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 im-
pulsive 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, loitli wliicli 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 occui
— its impulsion, in short, will be given to boot, and will
manifest itself as a matter of course. This is Avhat 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. AVhat checks
our impulses is the mere thinking of reasons to the con-



WTLL. 440

trary — it is tlieir bure presence to the mind which gives
the veto, and makes acts, otherwise seductive, imj)ossible
to perform. If we could only for yet our scruples, our
doubts, our fears, what exultant energy we should for a
â– wliik' display I

Will is a relation between the mind and its ' ideas.' In
closing in, tlicrcfurc, after all llicsc ]ircliniinarics, upon
the more intimate nature of the volitional process, we
find ourselves driven more and more exclusively to con-
eider the conditions which make ideas prevail in the mind.
With the prevalence, once there as a fact, of the motive
idea, i\\Q payclioloyy of volition properly stops. The move-
ments which ensue are exclusively i)hysiol(>gical phenomena,
following according to physiological laws upon the neural
events to which the idea corresponds. Tlie wiUiny termi-
nates 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 fol-
lows. I will to sneeze, and it does not. I will tiiat the
distant table slide over the floor towards me; it also does
not. My willing representation can no more instigate my
eneezing-centre than it can instigate the table to activ-
ity. 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
eupervention of motion is a supernumerary phenomenon
depending on executive ganglia whose function lies out-
side the mind. If the ganglia Wdrk duly, the act occurs
perfectly. If they work, but work wrongly, we have .St.
Vitus's dance, locomotor ataxy, motor aj)hasia, or minor
degrees of awkwardness. If they (b)n't work at all, the
act fails altogether, and we say the man is paralyzed, lie
may make a tremend»jus effort, and contract the otiier
rr.uscles of the l>ody, l)ut the jiaralyzed limb fails to move.
In all these ctwes, however, the volition considered au a
psychic pro«>*«»i ia iub**"*-



450 PSYCHOLOGY.

Volitional effort is effort of attention. We thus find that
we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition ivhen loe
ask by ivhat process it is that the thought of any given ac-
tion comes to prevail stahly 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 v/ords, 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 Atten-
tion we postponed the fina. 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 attetid 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.* Every reader must know by his own experience

*Tliis volitional effort pure and simple must be carefully distin-
guished from tlie muscular effort with which it is usually confounded.
The latter consists of all those peripheral feelings to which a muscu-
lar ' exertion ' may give rise. These feelings, whenever they are
massive and the body is not 'fresh,' are rather disagreeable, espe-
cially 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 xolitio7ial 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 sen-



WILL. 451

that this is so, ^or evorv rt-ailer must have felt some fiery
passion's grasp. What ituistitutes the ilittic-ulty for a man
laboring uiuler an unw ise passion of acting as if the pas-
sion .VL-re wise? Certainly tiiere is no physical (litVicuIty.
It is as easy physically to avoid w light as to begin oiu-, to
pocket one's money as to stpuiniler it on one's cuj)iilities,
to walk away from as towards »i coquette's door. Tlie dif-
ficulty 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 uj)on 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 smoth-
ered and crowded out. If Ave be joyous, we cannot keep
thinking of those iMiccrtainties and risks of failure Avhich
abound upon ouv path: if lugubrious, we cannot think of
new triumph-s travels, loves, and joys; nor if vengeful, of
our oppressor's community of nature with ourselves. The
cooling advice which we get from others wlien the fever-
fit is on UR is the most jarring and exasperating thing in
life. I?eply we cannot, so we get angry ; for by a sort of
self-preserving instinct which our passion has, it feels that
tupse 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 rea-
somiblc ideas over others—// theij can once get it fjiiicf hear-
ititj; and passion's cue accordingly is always and every-
where to prevent their still snudl voice from being heaid
at all. "Let me not think of that! Don't speak to me
of that I" This is the sudden cry of all those who in a
passion perceive some sobering considerations about to
<»heck them in mid-career. There is something so icy in
this cold-water batii, something which seems bo hostile to



nationH from bm muscular jm'-.sivity. Tim a<ti<iii of his will. In bus-
tainiiiK the expectation, i.s identical with that rc-<|uirt'(l for a painful
muACular effort. Wluit is hard for Ixdh \tij'<iriny an idea as rod.



452 PSTCEOLOQT.

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, con-
sents 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 conscious-
ness 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 appli-
cation 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 Avord, 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 ^resence^ this is effort's sole achieve-



WILL. 453

ment. Its only function is to get this leeling 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 hekl steadily before the mind until
it ////.'• 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 Avorld whose
other parts were as immediately subject to our will !

On page 430, in describing the * reasonable type * of de-
cision, it was said that it usually came when the right con-
ception of the case was found. AVhero, 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 sanc-
tified, 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 wliich the
interests of intellectual culture in such matters oblige iiim
to test; moreover it is poured out and it is sin to wjiste 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 be-
cause he feeis so cold; or it is Christnuis-day; or it is a
means of stimulating him to make a more j)owertul resolu-
tion 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
druiiJcnrd. That is the concejjtion that will not stay be-
fore the poor soul's attenti(jn. Hut if he once gets able to
pick out that way of conceiving, from all the other puaai-



454 PSYCHOLOO 7.

ble ways of conceiving the various opportunities which
occur, if through thick and thin he holds to it that this is
being a drunlfard and is nothing else, he is not likely to
remain one long. The effort hy which he succeeds in
keepin,(>- the right name unAvaveringly present to his mind
proves to he 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, v/ould slip away. It may he cold and flat when the
spontaneous mental drift is towards excitement, or great
Hud 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 Avill. 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 exhaus-
tion 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.
"Eather the aching toil!" he says; and it becomes reality
then, in spite of the innibiting 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 whirl-
ing chase of his ideas so far as to think of notliing 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 keej) the mind upon a train of objects
naturally so insipid. To sustain a representation, to
tMuTc, 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 fi]id 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,



WILL 465

"Let those alone be my reality!" But with sufficient
etiort, as Dr. Wigan says, " Such a man can for a time icind
Jiii/isi'lf up, as it were, and deterniine that tlie notions of the
disordered brain shall not be manifested. !Many instances
are on record similar to that told by I'inel, Avhere an inmate
of the Hicetre, having stood a long cross-examination, and'
iriven everv mark of restored reason, signed his name to
the paper authorizing his discharge 'Jesus Christ.' and
then uent otT into all the vagaries connected witli tliat
delusion. In the phraseology of the gentleman Avhose 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 cousciuiis 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 })ainful
tension of the mind. . . . "Wlien 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 psi/cho-
logical jjrocess in volition, the point to u'hiih the tvill is
directly applied, is always an idea. Tliere 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 tlie 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 wliirh we over perform.

The ftuestion of 'Free-will.' -As was remarked on p. 443,
in the exix-rience of effort we feel as if we might make
more or less than we actually at any moment are making.

The effort ai)pears, in other words, not as a fixed reaction
on our part which the oltject tluit resists us necessarily
calls forth, but m what the mathematicians call an *indo-



456 PSYCHOLOGY.

pendent 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 ivilh 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