VOLITION. 
109 
VOLITION. 
BY CONSTANCE C. W. NADEN. 
( Continued from page 57.) 
Now, let ns turn to voluntary actions; to those actions 
which are immediately preceded or accompanied by a con- 
cious mental effort in their own direction. These evidently 
must depend on the cerebral centres, since no other centre 
conducts its operations consciously. Whether any other 
centre conducts its operations with effort is another question, 
which I shall touch presently. 
Volitional actions are of two kinds —initiatory and 
inhibitory. The initiatory may give the signal for the 
beginning of a series of automatic actions. For instance, the 
first step in starting for a walk is volitional, but the effort is 
slight and does not require to be maintained. Or the action 
initiated may have been performed rarely or never before, 
and then the initiatory effort has to come in at every stage. 
The action may be physical or purely mental; it may be 
learning to dance or learning a foreign language, or applying 
muscular or intellectual energy to any kind of labour or study. 
In the same way, inhibitory volitions may concern thoughts 
or things ; we may try to refrain from some reflection, or 
from some deed. 
Every voluntary action, whether initiatory or inhibitory, 
is preceded by or bound' up with an act of attention, which is 
itself volitional, and both initiates by turning the mind in its 
own direction, and inhibits by suppressing tendencies in other 
directions. Wundt, in his “Physiological Psychology,” 
compares apperception, the product of attention, to the point 
of distinct vision, while simple perception, which follows upon 
mere inattentive sensation, corresponds to the entire field of 
vision. He says “ Apperception is the primitive voluntary 
action, the performance of which is always presupposed in 
the external voluntary actions. The condition necessary for 
the execution of a voluntary movement is the apperception of 
the representation of that movement.” He points out that 
our own feelings inform us of the state of nervous tension— 
accompanying that state of consciousness called attention, 
and constituting its physical side. It should be added, how¬ 
ever, that even attention may be unaccompanied by any sense 
of effort, and thus, according to our definition of volition, may 
be called involuntary. This may be due to automatism, as 
when the subject is familiar ; or due to impulse, as when the 
