16 WILLIAM JAMES ON 



tation of any form of instinctive pleasure which has grown inveterate and habitual. In a 

 word what is the nature of this^a^ of which we have so often spoken ? ^ 



In our bed we think of the cold, and we feel the warmth and lie still, but we all the 

 time feel that we can get up with no trouble if we will. The difficulty is to will. We 

 say to our intemperate acquaintance, " You can be a new man, if you will." But he finds 

 the willing impossible. One who talks nonsense under the influence of hasheesh, realizes 

 all the time his power to end his sentences soberly and sensibly, if he will. But his will 

 feels as yet no sufficient reason for exerting itself. A person lying in one of those half- 

 trance like states of immobility not infrequent with nervous patients, feels the power to 

 move undiminished, but cannot resolve to manifest it. And cases might be multiplied 

 indefinitely in which the fiat is not only a distinct, but a difficult and effort-requiring 

 moment in the performance. 



On the other hand cases may be multiplied indefinitely of actions performed with no 

 distinct volitional fiat at all, — the mere presence of an intellectual image of the move- 

 ment, and the absence of any conflicting image, being adequate causes of its produc- 

 tion. As Lotze says ■? " The spectator accompanies the throwing of a billiard ball, or 

 the thrust of the swordsman with slight movements of his arm; the untaught narrator 

 tells his story with many gesticulations ; the reader while absorbed in the perusal of a 

 battle scene feels a slight tension run through his muscular system, keeping time as it 

 were with the actions he is reading of. These results become the more marked the more 

 we are absorbed in thinking of the movements which suggest them ; they grow fainter 

 exactly in proportion as a complex consciousness, under the dominion of a crowd of other 

 representations, withstands the passing over of mental contemplation into outward action. 

 * * * We see in writing or piano-playing a great number of very complicated move- 

 ments following quickly one upon the other, the instigative representations of which 

 remained scarcely a second in consciousness, certainly not long enough to awaken any 

 other volition than the general one of resigning oneself without reserve to the passing 

 over of representation into action. All the actions of our daily life happen in this wise : 



^ The philosophic importance of clearing the ground for serve as the term which resists our fiat that it become real, 



the question may be shown by the example of Maine de M. de B.'s giving such a monstrous monopoly to the muscu- 



Biran. This thoroughly original writer's whole life was lar feelings is a consequence of his not having completed the 



devoted to the task of showing that the primordial fact of discriminalion I make in the text between all afferent sensa- 



conscious personality was the sentiment of volitional effort. tlons together on the one hand, and the fiat on the other. 



This intimate sense is the self in each of us. " It becomes Muscle feelings for him still occupy an altogether singular 



the self by the sole fact of the distinction which establishes hybrid and abnormal sort of position. 



itself between the subject of the effort and the term which ' Medicinische Psychologic, 1852, p. 293. In his 



resists by its own inertia. The ego cannot begin to know admirably acute chapter on the will this author has most 



itself or to exist for itself, except in so far as it can dis- explicitly maintained the position that what we call mus- 



tinguish itself as subject of an effort, from a term which cular exertion is an afferent and not an efferent feeling: 



resists." (CEuvres Inddites, Vol. 1, pp. 208, 212). Maine " We must affirm universally that in the muscular feeling we 



de Biran makes this resisting term the muscle, though it is are not sensible of the force on its way to produce an effect, 



true he does not, like so many of his successors, think we but only of the sufferance already produced in our moveable 



have an efferent sense of its resistance. Its resistance is organs, the muscles, after the force has, in a manner unob- 



known to us by a muscular sensation proper, the effect of the servable by us, exerted upon them its causality." (p. 311.) 



contraction (p. 213). We shall show in the sequel tiiat this How often the battles of psychology have to be fought over 



sensation resists our fiat or volitional effort proper in no again, each time with heavier armies and bigger trains, 



degree qua muscular, but simply qua disagreeable. Any though not always with so able generals, 

 other disagreeable sensation whatever may equally well 



