James H. Hyslop

“ A present desire, so far as it is a mere wish for an object, is not an efficient cause or motive of volition, but it must first reach the stage of an "impulsive idea," into which it may readily, and perhaps usually does, develop. It must take on, however, the character of a final cause with something of resolution and purpose before it is properly a motive that has any efficiency to produce volition. ”

“ But inhibition comes in with varying degrees of power to prevent habit from assuming absolute control of the subject, with many exceptions familiar to the student of psychology. It interrupts the tendency to direct and immediate transition from sensation or emotion into volition and offers opportunity for reflection. This is the only way in which a man can escape being the victim of any present state of mind, and in which he gains power to guide himself by the future rather than by the present moment. ”

“ Deliberation implies hesitation between two or more alternatives, and most persons would perhaps assert or suppose that it implied an equilibrium between two equal and opposite inclinations, in which the impulse of one motive neutralized the opposing influence of the other. If we suppose the latter assumption and its applications to be true, we have precisely the condition in which volition, if it actually took place, could not be explained except by the will's own initiative. ”

“ It is true that we do speak of emotions and desires as "motives" to action, but not as mere states of consciousness unaffected by the determination of attention and choice. Emotions are reflexes of action and so are concomitants or effects of functional exercise. They do not necessarily issue in a particular volition as soon as they enter into consciousness, unless the intellect after a shorter or longer deliberation permits it. ”

“ The sceptic, again, is a man in whom inhibition is highly developed. He is mainly the antithesis of the impulsive man, and shows a constant disposition to suppress the influences inducing him either to act or to adopt decided opinions. He is always weighing considerations on both sides of a question, and shows the development of inhibition in the higher functions of reason. If he decides to act his motive is a creation of his own mind. Hence all types of character which furnish their own motives to volition as a result of deliberation are free precisely in that proportion. ”

“ Consciousness naturally discharges itself upon the muscular system, as sensations are alarms against personal assault from the external world. Habit powerfully reinforces such a tendency and would make mere machines of us in a very short time were it not for inhibition. An experience which has once or twice, or more frequently, been the connecting link, as Mr. Spencer has shown, between stimulus and volition, will more readily repeat its action on each succeeding occasion, because mental and physical activity follow the lines of least resistance. ”

“ But without insisting upon or multiplying instances in which the higher intellectual consciousness shows its tendency to interrupt the causal agency of sensation and emotion and to produce deliberation and its internal motives, it is sufficient to know that it is a fact quite as universal as those higher states, and that it is in direct contradiction with the denial of freedom, based upon an immediate and inevitable nexus between the initial stages of consciousness and volition. ”

“ The immediate response shown by the infant to some sensation or emotion, without deliberating upon any alternative, and the promptness with which a hungry dog is impelled by the sight of food to seize and eat it, and the thousand acts of almost every individual determining the will at the moment of a sensational experience, are phenomena that show an uninterrupted series from the point B to C, in which the initiative is an external influence. There is no choice or deliberation in the reflexes, and none appears in the immediate transition from a sensation or emotion to volition. ”

“ As soon as an idea becomes an end or represents an object of the will, it may have efficiency to move the will, but not before. The end is a pure contribution of the ideational centre, and as the efficiency of this end as a motive awaits ideational activity to decide what shall be the final cause or ratio agendi, the cause of the volition comes wholly from within. ”

“ Reflex action, perhaps, never obtains the credit of being instigated by motives except as external stimuli may be given that name. Yet, since modern psychology considers such action as the original type of all our later modes of activity, it presents us with a phenomenon which very largely determines our conception of the relation between "motives" and conduct, even when we assume other than external stimuli as the cause or occasion of such conduct. ”

“ The sensation or other state is either utilized to indicate the safety of impulsive action, or any tendency which experience may have happened to favor in its mediating influence on volition is inhibited, until the mind may read aright the situation, when the "motive" becomes one that is furnished by the ego and not by the non-ego. As we have remarked, and as all modern psychology shows, there is such an intimate connection between stimulus and motor changes that the changes seem to be explosions occurring in response to the stimulus. ”

“ What we require from the distinction is, that actions initiated solely by efficient causes, or "motives," such as the instincts and reflexes, or even the emotions and desires considered as efficient agencies, are not free, but are necessary, and exclude either the presence and interposition of consciousness or the existence of alternative possibilities, while actions initiated by final causes, motives as ideas of ends, which may also be efficient, require by this very fact to be radically distinguished from mechanically conditioned conduct. ”

“ Perhaps the necessity for willing one way or the other is determined by external conditions; but, as we see from the nature of the ideational centres and their deliberative functions, the action willed, the alternative elected, is due to the mind, and not to the outer stimulus. Any such necessity created by external conditions may limit our responsibility but not our freedom, which is merely the self-initiative of ideational centres, instead of being an impulse in a causal series initiated by an external and mechanical impression. ”

“ So far as it merely establishes physical equilibrium of the nervous system, it only produces a passive condition from which no inner spontaneous action may issue, either conscious or unconscious. But it is the higher form of inhibition, which is essentially the same in character as the lower, as a restraint upon reflexes in some instances, and most frequently upon the tendency to a fixed causal relation between sensations or emotions and volition, and which renders deliberation possible — it is this form of inhibition that affects the problem of freedom in a more important way. ”

“ The sensation to all appearances is the cause of the volition in such cases, and inasmuch as the stimulus at B is beyond all control or determination by the subject, namely, is the effect of external impressions, and also the sensation at E being a pure sensory reflex, the supposition that the sensation or emotion, as it no doubt does in many cases, acts directly and efficiently to produce a motor discharge through EAC makes the motive a purely efficient cause instead of admitting the characteristic of a final cause as a part of the initiative. ”

“ He, therefore, succeeds in evading the issue and precipitates another and graver problem, making the facts of experience to support man's inability to do otherwise than he does, and assuming meanwhile that his ability to choose another alternative is a condition of freedom. Here, however, we demur to this assumption and propose to maintain that such an ability is the ratio cognoscendi, but not the ratio essendi of freedom, while we regard it as the ratio essendi of responsibility. ”

“ He is the victim of other than deliberative motives. While he may have a degree of freedom it is small compared with that of the man who first "looks before and after," and who holds in check his spontaneous tendencies to volition. On the other hand, there is the contemplative character whose activities are entirely of the ideational sort. In the extreme form he is as if afflicted with muscular paralysis. The muscular indolence of contemplative men is no doubt due to the constant inhibition of the ordinary impulses. If they act at all it must be from internal motives formed by deliberation. ”

“ They are the necessary effects of organic or mental action, but their existence, even as conditions of volition, does not empower them to produce it as an inevitable effect in a causal series; that is, they are not efficient or active causes of volition until they are supplemented by what may be called "impulsive ideas," and even then are mere attendants and indices of the real impulsive force. We often speak of pleasure and pain as motives of conduct, but the fact is that as present states they are either never such or can be such only by considering every volition or act merely reflex. ”

“ Supposing also that emotions, desires, sensations, and "motives" in general, occupy the same relation to the volition, which they precede, as the stimulus of reflex action, and are also the effect determined solely by an external stimulus, we have action in every respect like the reflexes. We are prepared to admit that a great many actions are so mediated. ”

“ In the case of the instincts we neither conceive external stimuli as the sufficient cause of the action initiated by them, nor intelligent choice as the condition of it. It is but one step to the consideration of emotions and desires as the motives of volition. ”

“ More common instances are such as modifying one's movements by some unexpected or additional impression, mitigating pain by some new sensory stimulus, suppressing one motive to act by another and opposing motive. If a child be engaged in active muscular exertion and be suddenly disturbed by a new object in the field of consciousness, it may cease at once from its exercise. The new impression is said to inhibit the motor action going on at the time. ”

“ But before free volition can be proved this inhibition must be of the higher ideational centres upon sensation, as already indicated, and this can be shown to be the case in a thousand ways. Every comparison between a present and a past experience involves it. We can safely affirm, then, that all the higher activities of consciousness are essentially inhibitive, to some extent perhaps in relation to reflexes, but more particularly in relation to sensational and emotional impulses, while they may be themselves per se impulsive as motives. ”

“ But as soon as memory and association can act to call up with a present sensation some past experience the worth of the two may be compared, and the causal nexus between sensations and volition having been broken by the inhibition, the motive to action must come from the ideational centre, and it may or may not conform with the original inclination. ”

“ Hence in all schools of thought where reflex action and action under the immediate impulse of present sensations or emotions were considered incompatible with the freedom of the will, if all volition had to be reduced to those types, that doctrine was, of course, denied in spite of the fact that consciousness was an accompaniment of the action. ”

“ The Necessitarian is therefore reduced to the position of assuming that all "motives" are one in kind, the so called "external motives," and that they are the immediate causes of volition, or of denying the existence of deliberation. For, as long as we suppose deliberation to be hesitation between two conflicting "motives," we cannot attach immediate causation to all of them, and not affirming it of all of them is paramount to the admission of freedom. This is clear from the above two alternatives. ”

“ A represents a nervous centre and B the point of stimulus and AB the line of transmission. AC represents the reflex act. The whole series of phenomena occurring between B and C is simply one of mechanical causation, according to our supposition, and inasmuch as volition in the mature subject passes along the same lines of muscular egress, anteceded by some stimulus known either as an impression or a motive, or both, the character of that event seems to be the same as the action from which it is presumably developed. ”

“ The difficulty of disputing the conclusion in such cases, representing presumably the whole conduct of animal life and a large part of human life, was not that free action was impossible when so directly connected with sensation or emotion, but that there was no proof of that freedom so long as the sequence conformed exactly to the law of mechanical causation. In reflex action there is neither the concomitant of consciousness nor the proof of free action ”

“ It remains only to show the extent in which ideational centres are inhibitive and promotive of opportunities for reflection, as against the instantaneous reactions from present impressions, reflex, sensational, or emotional. In the first place the fact that consciousness of whatever degree is in its nature an inhibitive force, whatever else it may be, is sufficiently proved by two well known facts. ”