THE FEELING OF EFFORT. 05 



It is needless after this to say what absolutely different phenomena these two efforts 

 are, or to expatiate upon the unfortunateness of their being confounded under the same 

 generic name. Muscular feelings whenever they are massive, and the body is not 

 "fresh," are rather disagreeable, especially when accompanied by stopped breath 

 congested head, bruised skin of fingers, toes, or shoulders, and strained joints And it is 

 only as thus disagreeable that the mind has difl&culty in consenting to their reality 

 That they happen to be made real by our bodily activity is a purely accidental 

 circumstance. A soldier standing still to be fired at, expects disagreeable sensations 

 engendered by his bodily passivity. The action of his will, in consenting to the 

 expectation, is identical with that of the sailor rising to go to the pumps. What is hard 

 for both is facing an idea as real. 



The action of the will must not be limited to the willing of an act. To exert the will 

 and to make soft muscles hard, are not one thing, but two entirely different things. 

 Extremely frequent association may account for, but not excuse their confusion by the 

 psychologist. The represented disagreeableness of a muscular motion may often be that 

 which an exertion of will is called on to overcome ; but as well might a cook, who daily 

 associates the burning of the fire with the boiling of the potatoes, define the inward 

 essence of combustion as the making of hard potatoes soft. 



The action of the will is the reality of consent to a fact of any sort whatever, a fact in 

 which we ourselves may play either an active, or a suffering part. The fact always 

 appears to us in an idea : and it is willed by its idea becoming victorious over inhibiting 

 ideas, banishing negations, and remaining afiirmed. The victorious idea is in every case 

 whatsoever built up of images of feelings afferent in their origin. And the first philo- 

 sophical conclusion properly so-called, into which our inquiry leads us, is a confirmation of 

 the older sensationalist view that all the mind's materials without exception are derived 

 from passive sensibility. Those who have thought that sensationahsm abdicated its throne 

 and mental spontaneity came in when Prof Bain admitted a " sensation of energy 

 exerted by the outgoing stream," have rejoiced in the wrong place altogether. There is 

 a feeling of mental spontaneity, opposed in nature to all afferent feelings; but it -does not 

 like the pretended feeling of muscular innervation, sit among them as among its peers. 

 It is something which dominates them all, by simply choosing from their midst. It may 

 reinforce either one in turn — a retinal image by attending to it, a motor image by willing 

 it, a complex conception, like that of the world having a divine meaning, by believing it. 

 Whatever mental material this element of spontaneity comes and perches on, is sustained, 

 affirmed, selected from the rest ; though but for the feeling of spontaneous psychic effort, 

 which thus reinforces it, we are conscious every moment that it might cease to be. The 

 whole contrast of a priori and empirical elements in the mind lies, I am fully convinced, 

 in this distinction. All our mind's contents are alike empirical. What is a priori is only 

 their accentuation and emphasis. This greeting of the spirit, this acquiescence, conni- 

 vance, partiality, call it what you will, which seems the inward gift of our selfhood, and no 

 essential part of the feelings, to either of which in turn it may be given, — this psychic 

 effort pure and simple, is the fact which a priori psychologists really have in mind when 

 they indignantly deny that the whole intellect is derived from sense. 



