THE PHYSIOLOGICAL VIEW OF " WILL."
lUrR. C. IL LAKE, in an able and interesting letter which in we publish in another column, takes up the physiological cudgels for the Neceasarian view of human character, against the subtle physiological argument of Dr. Carpenter on. the other side, which we gave last week. That argument for the real existence of a separate function of mind called Will was the following :— That various stimulant poisons like haschisch and opium are found to give an increased intensity and vivacity to the involun- tary elements of character, to the desires and affections, to the fancy, the imagination, and the power of reverie, while they enormously weaken the power of what is usually called voluntary action. Now, Dr. Carpenter's argument was this :—How is such a contrast between the effect on the involuntary and the voluntary elements of character possible, unless there be some real and radical distinction between what is involuntary and what is voluntary ? Or, as we developed his argument last week,—if the ' will' be a mere resultant of all the desires acting on character, then that which stimulates all those desires should stimulate the will. Only if it be a mental function quite distinct from those involuntary desires, attractions, and repulsions, could we expect that what seems to intensify them might weaken it. To this position Mr. Lake replies, that what in his belief happens under the influence of opium is—that certain nerve- centres are poisoned, so that certain nerves act with a morbid and, we suppose, febrile energy, while the poison produces a great decline of general vital power,—and that it is in the general decline of vital power that the inability to act as the sufferer feels and knows he ought to act, consists. Where there is least vital
power, there is most inability to When the vital power returns, there is increased ability to will. Mr. Lake holds (with
Professor Bain) that ' ' is " original spontaneous power (the ceaseless stir of the young animal) plus the modification of trained intellect and feeling." We had remarked that on the necessarian view of human character, " a man who controls his desires only means a man one or more of whose wise desires are stronger than all his unwise ones put together." Mr. Lake thinks this exposition of the necessarian view an unfair one, but does not make it clear where it is unfair, except that he thinks it unreasonable to overlook that spontaneous energy, that unexplained stir of animal life, which takes place without being the response to any external stimulus, and which he regards as the root of all volition. And he reminds us that Professor Bain himself has wisely and emphatically insisted on the recognition of this fundamental stir of spontaneity as a physiological fact, ignored by his predecessors in the same school of psychology. Now, if we understand Mr. Lake rightly, what he holds is, that the poisons which intensify so much the moral desires, while paralysing the moral power of volition, diminish indefinitely this stir of spontaneous animal vitality, though in- creasing the morbid action of certain nervous centres ; and he regards the imbecility produced by these poisons as due to the lowered animal energy, which may be inseparably connected with the heightened nervous consciousness. Well, iu that case, it would appear, that to strengthen the desire or motive for a certain course of action does not necessarily strengthen, and may often weaken, the probability of its being performed ; you may strengthen the motive at the expense of the capacity,—just as in Scott's novel, the rush of Brian de Bois Gilbert's passionate desire -0 avenge himself on Ivanhoe, is represented as the very cause of the apoplexy which makes him fall dead beneath his antagonist's feeble blow. Even in leas sensational instances, it is not un- common to find an intense desire to do a thing well, diminishing the executive power. Strength is spent in thinking or feeling, that is needed for doing, and the result is more intensely stimulated motives to action, and poorer results. This explains how it may happen that strength of wish' may flow, while strength of will' ebbs, but only if you mean by strength of will' the physical con- ditions—in short, the bodily health—requisite to bring your body into subjection to your mind. Just so a man might have a very intense desire to move a paralysed arm, and might issue the volition as well as feel the desire,—if that be a totally different thing, as we maintain,—but might, none the less, not have the capacity to move it, on account of the injury to the bodily organisation.
But that is not the sense in which we use the word "will. We mean by will and volition that mental state, as distinguished from all bodily capacity whatever, which expresses the purpose, as dis- tinct from, and often diverging from, though it may of course often be in sympathy with, the resultant of all the desires. Go back to that primitive and radical act of will on which Dr. Car- penter insists, the act of intellectual attention,—and it surely behoves the necessarians to maintain that the only conceivable rationale of what Dr. Carpenter calls " voluntary" attention, is that the resultant of all the motives acting on the mind fixes the mind on the subject attended to, and that there is not and cannot be any real distinction at all between ' automatic attention' and 'voluntary attention.' For, in this case, it is hardly possible to interpose the caution that the very same cause may produce the intensity of the wish, and the incapacity to follow up the wish. It must surely require far less"' vital power,' far less spontaneous stir in the young animal,' to think of what, on the whole, inter- ests you most, than of what interests you less. If, then, there be no such thing as ' will' as distinct from desire on the one hand, and from physical capacity for execution on the other, we should discover it here. The same passion which stimulates the intensity of the desire should stimulate the intensity of the at- tention. Though it may be only the more difficult to act, even as you intensely desire, because of the very intensity of that desire, this is because an 'act' in this sense involves the muscular system, the whole animal energy and mechanism of the body. Keep to the region of the government of pure thought, and the question ought not even to arise as to the difference of result produced by vital energy and by morbid nervous action. If the morbid nervous action stimulates intellectual and moral desire, it should stimulate atten- tion, and the direction given to the attention must be determined by the resultant of all the attractive and repulsive forces which make 'up what we call our ' interests,' while to fix our thoughts on a subject which does not interest us so much as something else, should be simply impossible. Indeed this is apparently the view ac- cepted by Mr. Lake. He says that if we translate " directing the mind," in the only intelligible way, by " a certain original force with transmitted tendency, modified by food, habits, &c., together with the influence of idiosyncratic intellect, feeling," we get " the resultant of the necessarians." No doubt we do, but the trans- lation,' so far from being intelligible, does not even resemble its original. If Mr. Lake had translated the phrase directing the mind' into the cuneiform character, he could not have made it look less like itself. The phrase stands for an act we are all of us always performing, and which, as we know very well, means some- thing quite distinct from abandoning ourselves to the resultant of all the forces impressed on our nature. Nay, it means precisely the contradictory of that. And here it is, as it seems to us, that Dr. Carpenter gains his victory over the physiological school of Professor Bain to which Mr. C. H. Lake gives in his adhesion. There is such a thing as directing the mind to a sub- ject to which our interests do not attract it, and that is what Professor Bain and Mr. Lake cannot afford to admit. If their theory is true, whatever is meant by voluntary attention ought to be just as easy to the opium-eater as to the healthy person ; for it seems that these poisons stimulate all our desires, our right and wise, quite as much as our wrong and foolish desires, and if volition (except so far as it in- volves a good supply of animal and vital energy) were nothing but the resultant of all these desires, these poisons would cer-
tainly stimulate the wish to attend to subjects which for moral reasons you preferred to attend to, as much as the wish to attend
to those which had a merely intellectual fascination for you. As we have said before, if there be no real distinction between automatic and voluntary attention,—if, in fact, all attention be in the same sense automatic, and independent of any distinct function of mind called volition,—there should be no such phenomenon as the special incapacity, so much aggravated by certain forms of intem- perance, to concentrate the attention on one subject. In that case, the concentration of the attention would be itself an automatic act, and no more vital energy would be needed to think-steadily on one subject than to let the mind float over many. The very words in which we describe the involuntary attention of reverie,— 'floating,' and so forth,—imply that the mind is more passive in such states than in regulated and controlled thought. But ac- cording to the necessasian, all that is a delusion. The mind is in either case acting in the way in which the resultant of all inherited idiosyncratic and transmitted force causes it to act, and the phenomenon of inability to fix the attention is not really unique or peculiar at all, but of the same kind of origin, though of course a result of different antecedents, with the highest power of concen- trative attention.
Mr. Lake maintains, if we understand him rightly, that the " distractions " against which the mind struggles in the attempt to concentrate its thoughts on a given subject are as much phases' of will as is the effort to overcome them. Of course, if language may be so used, language ceases to discriminate, and only confounds thoughts. It is fair to contend that the whole psychological scenery we find within us is illusion, that when we seem to struggle against intellectual distractions we are the victims of such an illusion ; but to assert on any evidence of our own consciousness that we are really distracting ourselves with one heave of the mind, and resisting the distraction with another, is simply to falsify the testimony which the usages of
speech all show to be dead against Mr. ak-'s view. It is quite a mistake, then, to suppose that the argument of Dr. Car- penter is disposed of by the assertion that opium lowers the animal or vital energy, and that merely by lowering that energy it lowers what we call will.' Why, on the necessarian theory, should it take more animal energy to keep the thoughts on one subject than to let them wander? On that theory the word 'keep' ' is itself a mistake, and we ought to put the question thus, ' Why should it take more animal energy in a man's constitution for his thoughts to stay on a given subject than it does for them to wander?' Either process alike is, on that theory, the result of spontaneous or inherited conditions of mind, and there is no more need of bodily health for the purpose of thinking of one thing you wish to think of, than of thinking of many things you do not wish to think of. Yet we all of us describe certain states of attention as involuntary and others as the results of will. Mr. Lake says the will' is just as much in the involuntary as in the voluntary thought, — in otherwords, that ' will' is a false mode of expression altogether, and should be expunged from the language, as a will- o'-the-wisp which has led us into impassable bogs. Very well ; but that is an arraignment of universal experience, not of a par- ticular school of philosophy.
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