THE FEELING OF EFFORT. 27 



any simple suggestion will be both believed and acted on, because none of its usual asso- 

 ciates are awakened. Bain ^ and Taine ^ have beautifully shown how in the normal sub- 

 ject all ideas taken per se are hallucinatory or held as true. Doubt never comes from any 

 intrinsic insufficiency in a thought, but from the manner in which extrinsic ideas conflict 

 with it, or in Taine's phrase, serve as its reductive. Before they come we have the primal 

 state of theoretic and practical innocence. 



But wider suggestions bring the fall, and turn the simple credulity to doubt and the 

 fearless spontaneity to hesitation. A stable faith, a firm decree, can then only come after 

 reflection, and be its fruits. What is reflection ? A conflict between many ideas of 

 possibility. During the conflict the sense of reality is lost or rather the connexion 

 between it and each of the ideas in turn. The conflict is over when the sense of reality 

 returns, like the tempered steel, ten times more precious and invincible for its icy bath in 

 the waters of uncertainty. But why and how does it return ? and why does it so often 

 return with the symptom of effort by its side ? Is it an independent entity which merely 

 took its flight at the first alarm of the battle, and which now with eifort as its ally and 

 affirmation at its right hand and negation at its left, comes back to give the victory to one 

 idea ? Or is it a simple resultant of the victory which was a foregone conclusion decided 

 by the intrinsic strength of the conflicting ideas alone ? 



We stand here in the presence of another mighty metaphysical problem. If the latter 

 alternative be true there is no genuine spontaneity, no ambiguous power of decision, no 

 real freedom either of faith or of act. The effort which seems to come and reinforce one 

 side, endowing it with the feeling of reality, can be no new force adding itself to those 

 already in the arena. It can only be a sort of eddy or derivative from their movement, 

 whose semblance of independent form is illusory, and whose amount and direction are 

 implicitly given the moment they are posited. 



This has been the doctrine of powerful schools. The ideas themselves and their con- 

 flict have been held to constitute the total history of the mind, with no unaccounted-for 

 phenomenon left over. Long before mutual inhibition by nerve processes had been dis- 

 covered, the inhibitions and furtherances of one idea by another, had by Herbart been 

 erected into a completely elaborated system of psychic statics and dynamics. The English 

 associationist school, without using the word inhibition, and in a much less outwardly 

 systematic, though by no means less successful way, had also represented choice and 

 decision as nothing but the resultant of different ideas failing to neutralize each other 

 exactly. Doubt, fear, contradiction, curiosity, desire, assent, conviction, affirmation, nega- 

 tion and effi)rt, are all alike, on this view, but collateral products, incidents of the form of 

 equilibrium of the representations, as they pass from the oscillating to the stable state. 



This is of course conceivable ; — and to have the conception in a lively manner, 

 (as Hume says), may well in us as in so many others, carry the sense of reality with it, 

 and command conviction. But still the other alternative conflicts, and may reduce this 

 conception to one of mere possibility, degrading it from a creed to an hypothesis. It 

 seems impossible, if our minds are in this open state, to find any crucial evidence which 

 may decide. I shall, therefore, not pretend to dogmatize myself, but close this essay by a 



1 Emotions and Will. 3d Ed. pp. 511-517. 2 De I'Intelligence. Part i, Book ii, Chap. i. 



