30 WILLIAM JAMES ON 



is resolved, and disappears. Our feeling about it is just the other way, — which shows how 

 little our feeling has to do with the matter. 



The subject has an interest in connection with the free-will controversy. It is an 

 admitted mechanical principle that the resultant movement of a system of bodies linked 

 together in definite relations of energy, may vary according to changes in their collocation, 

 brought about by moving them at right angles to their pre-existing movements ; which 

 changes will not interfere with the conservation of the system's energy, as they perform 

 work upon it. Certain persons desiring to harmonize free will with the theory of 

 conservation, have used this conception to symbolize the dynamic relations of will with 

 brain, by saying that the mental effort merely determines the moment and the spot at 

 which a certain molecular vis viva shall start, by a sort of rectangular pressure 

 which plays the part of an independent variable in the equations of movement required 

 by the principles of conservation. Thus free will may be conceived without any of the 

 internal energy of the system being either augmented or destroyed. 



Now so long as mental effort in general was supposed to have a particular connection 

 with muscular effort, and so long as muscular effort was supposed to reveal to us behind 

 the resistance of bodies, a " force " which they contained, there was a ready reply to all 

 this speculation. Your will, it could be said, is doing '-work" upon the system. "Work" 

 is defined in mechanics as movement done against resistance, and your will meets 

 with a resistance which it has to overcome by moral effort. Were the molecular 

 movements brought about Ijy the will, rectangular to pre-existing movements, they 

 would not resist, and the volition would be effortless. But the volition involves effort, 

 and since according to the will-muscle-force-sense theory, its effort is an inner force which 

 overcomes a real outer force, since, indeed, without this antagonism we should be 

 without the notion of outer force altogether, why then the effort, if free, must be an 

 absolutely new contribution and creation so far as the sum of cosmic energy is con- 

 cerned. The only alternative then (if one still held to the will-muscle-force-sense 

 theory) was either with Sir John Herschel,^ frankly to avow that "force" may be 

 created anew, and that " conservation" is only an approximate law; or else to drop free- 

 will, in favor of conservation, and suppose the ego in willing, to be merely cognitively 

 conscious, in the midst of the universal force-stream, of certain currents with which 

 it was mysteriously fated to identify itself 



To my mind all such discussions rest on an anthropomorphization of outward force, 

 which is to the last degree absurd. Outward forces so far as they are anything, 

 are masses in certain positions, or in certain movements, and nought besides. The 

 muscular "force-sense" reveals to us nothing but hardness and pressure, which are sub- 

 jective sensations, like warmth or pain. The moral effort is not transitive between the 

 inner and the outer worlds, but is put forth upon the inner world alone. Its point of 

 a25plication is an idea. Its achievement is " reality for the mind," of that idea. That, 

 when the idea is realized, the corresponding nerve tracts should be modified, and so 

 de jyroche en proche, the muscles contract, is one of those harmonies between inner and 

 outer worlds, before which our reason can only avow its impotence. If our reason tries to 

 interpret the relation as a dynamic one, and to conceive that the neural modification is 



' Loc. cit., p. 468. 



