The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)

[502]Caricatures of the kind of supposition which free will demands abound in deterministic literature. The following passage from John Fiske's Cosmic Philosophy (pt. ii. chap. xvii) is an example: "If volitions arise without cause, it necessarily follows that we cannot infer from them the character of the antecedent states of feeling. If, therefore, a murder has been committed, we have a priori no better reason for suspecting the worst enemy than the best friend of the murdered man. If we see a man jump from a fourth-story window, we must beware of too hastily inferring his insanity, since he may be merely exercising his free-will; the intense love of life implanted in the human breast being, as it seems, unconnected with attempts at suicide or at self-preservation. We can thus frame no theory of human actions whatever. The countless empirical maxims of every-day life, the embodiment as they are of the inherited and organized sagacity of many generations, become wholly incompetent to guide us; and nothing which any one may do ought ever to occasion surprise. The mother may strangle her first-born child, the miser may cast his long-treasured gold into the sea, the sculptor may break in pieces his lately-finished statue, in the presence of no other feelings than those which before led them to cherish, to hoard, and to create.

"To state these conclusions is to refute their premise. Probably no defender of the doctrine of free-will could be induced to accept them, even to save the theorem with which they are inseparably wrapped up. Yet the dilemma cannot be avoided. Volitions are either caused or they are not. If they are not caused, an inexorable logic brings us to the absurdities just mentioned. If they are caused, the free-will doctrine is annihilated.... In truth, the immediate corollaries of the free-will doctrine are so shocking, not only to philosophy but to common-sense, that were not accurate thinking a somewhat rare phenomenon, it would be inexplicable how any credit should ever have been given to such a dogma. This is but one of the many instances in which by the force of words alone men have been held subject to chronic delusion.... Attempting, as the free-will philosophers do, to destroy the science of history, they are compelled by an inexorable logic to pull down with it the cardinal principles of ethics, politics, and jurisprudence. Political economy, if rigidly dealt with on their theory, would fare little better; and psychology would become chaotic jargon.... The denial of causation is the affirmation of chance, and 'between the theory of Chance and the theory of Law there can be no compromise, no reciprocity, no borrowing and lending.' To write history on any method furnished by the free-will doctrine would be utterly impossible."—All this comes from Mr. Fiske's not distinguishing between the possibles which really tempts man and those which tempt him not at all.

Free-will, like psychology, deals with the former possibles exclusively.

[503] On the education of the Will from a pedagogic point of view, see an article by G. Stanley Hall in the Princeton Review for November 1882, and some bibliographic references there contained.

[504] See his Emotions and Will, 'The Will,' chap. i. I take the name of random movements from Sully, Outlines of Psychology, p. 593.

[505] This figure and the following ones are purely schematic, and must not be supposed to involve any theory about protoplasmatic and axis-cylinder processes. The latter, according to Golgi and others, emerge from the base of the cell, and each cell has but one. They alone form a nervous network. The reader will of course also understand that none of the hypothetical constructions which I make from now to the end of the chapter are proposed as definite accounts of what happens. All I aim at is to make it clear in some more or less symbolic fashion that the formation of new paths, the learning of habits, etc., is in some mechanical way conceivable. Compare what was said in Vol. I. p. 81, note.

[506] The Nervous System and the Mind (1888), pp. 75-6.

[507] Compare Vol. I. pp. 137, 142.

[508] That is, the direction towards the motor cells.

[509] This brain-scheme seems oddly enough to give a certain basis of reality to those hideously fabulous performances of the Herbartian Vorstellungen. Herbart says that when one idea is inhibited by another it fuses with that other and thereafter helps it to ascend into consciousness. Inhibition is thus the basis of association in both schemes, for the 'draining' of which the text speaks is tantamount to an inhibition of the activity of the cells which are drained, which inhibition makes the inhibited revive the inhibiter on later occasions.

[510] See the luminous passage in Münsterberg: Die Willenshandlung, pp. 144-5.

[511] L. Lange's and Münsterberg's experiments with 'shortened' or 'muscular' reaction-time (see Vol. I. p. 432) show how potent a fact dynamically this anticipatory preparation of a whole set of possible drainage-channels is.

[512] Even as the proofs of these pages are passing through my hands, I receive Heft 2 of the Zeitschrift für Psychologie u. Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, in which the irrepressible young Münsterberg publishes experiments to show that there is no association between successive ideas, apart from intervening movements. As my explanations have assumed that an earlier excited sensory cell drains a later one, his experiments and inferences would, if sound, upset all my hypotheses. I therefore can (at this late moment) only refer the reader to Herr M.'s article, hoping to review the subject again myself in another place.