Problems of Life and Mind. Second series by George Henry Lewes (best contemporary novels TXT) 📕

stick and with it drive the donkey away is a cerebral rehearsal of the effects which will follow my act. The sight of the donkey has roused disagreeable feelings, and these suggest possible means of alleviation; out of these possibilities—reproductions of former experiences—I choose one. But if I seize the stick with which some one is threatening me, I do not pause to choose, I snatch automatically without hesitation. Yet this unreflecting automatic act is itself as truly volitional as my seizing the stick to drive away the donkey—it is the motor which has been organized in me by previous experiences—it is the consequence of an emotion, not of a deliberation; and it has not been determined by any clear prevision of consequences. Feeling inspires, and feeling guides my movements, so that if my snatch has missed the stick, I snatch again, or duck under. This is the kind of Volition we ascribe to animals. It is a great part of our own. By insensible degrees, acts which originally were prompted by motives sink into the automatic class prompted by motors. When an angry man snatches up a knife, doffs bystanders aside, and rushes on his enemy to stab him, he does not distinctly prefigure the final result, he only obeys each motor, and is conscious of each step; but had he planned the murder he would have foreseen the end, and this prevision would have been the motive. The angry man is struck with horror at the sight of the bleeding corpse, and passionately declares he did not mean to kill. Nor did he will the consequences of his act, yet he certainly willed each separate step—he recognized the knife, saw the bystanders, knew they would interfere with him, willed to push them aside. He may be right in declaring that the act was involuntary; but assuredly it was not purely mechanical.

69. Again, we are not conscious of the separate sensations which guide speech or writing; we cannot properly be said to will the utterance of each tone, or the formation of each letter. Are these processes mechanical and not volitional? By no means. We know that they were laboriously learned by long tentative efforts, each of which was accompanied by distinct consciousness. We also know that now when the mechanism is so easy in its adjustment as to suggest automatism, there needs but a slight alteration in the conditions to make us distinctly conscious of the processes—the wrong word spoken, or one letter ill formed, suffices to arrest the easy working of the mechanism. A similar mechanism operates in thinking, which also lapses from the conscious and voluntary to the unconscious and involuntary state. The logical process of Judgment is as purely a reflex from one neural group to another, as the physiological process of co-ordination. In ordinary thinking we are as little conscious of the particular steps—our interest being concentrated on the result—as we are of the particular stages of an action. The adjustments of the mechanism of Reproduction and Association are set going by a motive, and kept going by psychological motors. And here—as in bodily actions—there is often a conflict between motive and motors—between the foreseen result, and the available means of reaching it—the motors usually prevailing because they represent the active side of the mechanism. Thus when an oculist wishes to examine a patient’s eye, he does not tell him to give a particular direction to his eye, knowing that the motive to do so will not suffice; instead of this he simply moves his own hand in the desired direction, certain that the eye will by reflex irresistibly follow it. Nay, there are sometimes such anomalies of innervation that the eye, instead of obeying the motive, moves in a contrary direction. Meschede mentions a patient whose movements were mostly of this anomalous kind: when he willed to move the eyes to the right, they moved to the left; when he willed to move them up, they moved down. It was thus also with his hands and feet. Yet he was distinctly conscious that his intention had been frustrated, and that he acted “because he could not help it.”217 How insensibly a motive sinks into a motor, that is to say, a voluntary into an involuntary act, may be recognized in speech, writing, singing, walking, etc., and in the incessant movements of the eye in fixing objects. Aubert has well remarked that we only give definite movements to the eye when we wish to see an object distinctly. Whenever the indistinct vision suffices—as in walking through the streets occupied in conversation or thought—we make no such movements; but no sooner does any object excite our attention, than the effort to fix that object at once excites the necessary reflex.218

70. By the Will, then, we must understand the abstract generalized expression of the impulses which determine actions, when those impulses have an ideal origin; by Volition the still more generalized expression of all impulses which determine actions. The one class is that of motives with ideal elements; the other that of motors with sensational or emotional elements. But both are mental states, both are neural processes in a sentient organism; neither is mechanical, except in so far as all actions are expressible in mechanical terms. For convenience we class actions as reflex, automatic, involuntary, unconscious, voluntary, and conscious. If we separate the reflex from the voluntary, we need not therefore dissociate the former from Sensibility; and the reason why we ought not to separate it is that we know it to be sense-guided from first to last, although the sensations may escape discrimination. The feeling of Effort, which was formerly felt when an action was performed, may have become so minimized that it is too faint for more than a momentary consciousness, too evanescent for the memory to retain it; yet the feeling must always be operant when its mechanism is in action. The ease with which the mechanism works does not change the adjustment of its elements, nor alter its character. The facile unobtrusive performance of a vital function does not change it from a vital to a mechanical act. Mr. Spencer seems to me to express himself ambiguously when he says: “Just as any set of psychical changes originally displaying Memory, Reason, and Feeling cease to be conscious, rational, and emotional as fast as they by repetition grow closely organized, so do they at the same time pass beyond the sphere of Volition. Memory, Reason, Feeling, and Will disappear in proportion as psychical changes become automatic”219—for while it is perfectly true that we only call those psychical changes “automatic” which have lost the special qualities called “conscious, rational, and emotional,” it is not less true that they remain from first to last psychical changes, and are thereby distinguished from physical changes. To suppose that they pass from the psychical to the physical by frequent repetition would lead to the monstrous conclusion that when a naturalist has by laborious study become so familiarized with the specific marks of an animal or plant that he can recognize at a glance a particular species, or recognize from a single character the nature of the rest, the rapidity and certainty of this judgment proves it to be a mechanical, not a mental act. The intuition with which a mathematician sees the solution of a problem would then be a mechanical process, while the slow and bungling hesitation of the tyro in presence of the same problem would be a mental process: the perfection of the organism would thus result in its degradation to the level of a machine!

The operations of the intellect may furnish us with an illustration. Ideas are symbols of sensations. The idea of a horse is an abstraction easily traceable to concrete sensations, yet as an abstraction is so different a state of feeling that we only identify it with its concretes by a careful study of its stages of evolution, namely, sensation, image, reproduced images resembling yet differing from the original sensation, a coalescence of their resemblances, and finally the substitution of a verbal symbol for these images. With this symbol the intellect operates, and sometimes operates so exclusively with it that not the faintest trace of image or sensation is appreciable—the word horse takes the place of the image in the sequence of sensorial processes, just as the image takes the place of the sensation. It does this as a neural equivalent. In the same way we substitute verbal symbols for a bag of sovereigns when we pay a creditor with a check; he pays the check away to another; and this monetary equivalent passes from hand to hand without a single coin making its appearance. Does the transaction cease to be commercial, monetary, in this substitution of signs? No; nor does a process cease to be psychical when an image is substituted for a sensation, and a verbal symbol for an image. This every one will admit. Must we not go further, and extend the admission to automatic actions which originally were voluntary, and have now lost all trace of ideal prevision, and almost all traces of accompanying consciousness? The motor mechanism has its symbols also; in this sense, that whereas the action which at first needed complex sensorial processes to set it going and keep it going, is now determined by a single one of those processes taking the place of their resultant. When a practised accountant runs his eye up a column of figures, he does not pause to realize the values of those figures by decomposing the symbols into their numerical units, he simply groups one symbol with another according to their intuited relations, and the final result is reached with a certainty not less, and a rapidity far greater, than if it had been reached by step-by-step verification. It is thus with the pianoforte-player. It is thus with all automatic performances, except those dependent on the connate adjustments of the mechanism.