WILL. 653 



All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undress- 

 ing, the coining and going from our work or carrying 

 through of its various operations, is utterly without mental 

 reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized 

 conditions. It is ideo-motor action. As I do not breathe 

 for the pleasure of the brea,thing, but simply tind that I am 

 breathing, so I do not write for the pleasure of the writ- 

 uig, but simply because I have once begun, and being in a 

 otate of intellectual excitement which keeps venting itself 

 in that way, find that I am writing still. Who will pretend 

 chat 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 because 

 at the moment we cannot help it ; our nervous systems are 

 so shaped that they overflow in just that way ; and for 

 many of our idle or purely ' nervous ' and fidgety perform- 

 ances we can assign absolutely no reason 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 compulsion on him, he can think of no excuse, and so 

 says yes, cursing himself the while for what he does. He 

 is unusually sui compos who does not every week of his 

 life fall into some such blundering act as this. Such in- 

 stances of vohmtas invita show not only that our acts can- 

 not all be conceived as efi'ects of represented pleasure, 

 but that they cannot even be classed as cases of re]3re- 

 resented good. The class * goods ' contains many more gen- 

 erally influential motives to action than the class * pleas- 

 ants.' Pleasures often attract us only because we deem 

 them goods. Mr. Spencer, e.g., urges us to court pleasures 

 for their influence upon health, which comes to us as a good. 

 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 are instances 

 to the contrary. It is the very badness of the act that gives 

 it then its vertiginous fascination. Remove the prohibi- 

 tion, and the attraction stops. In my universit}^ days a 

 student threw himself from an upper entry window of one 

 of the college buildings and was nearly killed. Another 



