Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/408

 392 CBITICAL NOTICES: pletely your socially verified psychological uniformities, and they run not thus : " All men, after feeling A, feel B " ; but rather thus : " Whenever men physically express or report that they feel A, thereafter they report, or otherwise physically express, that they feel B ". For example, if we wish to state the whole of a familiar psychological induction, we ought not to say merely that : " Violent) emotions, in normal minds, lead to feelings of weariness " ; but rather that, as our whole " common experience " of normal man- kind shows : " Violent expressions of emotion, in case of people who are otherwise normal, are ere long followed by symptoms of exhaustion, amongst which are, normally, symptoms that the sufferer feels exhausted ". To state the case thus gives us the causal linkage as known to the observers of human nature. And exceptions to such empirical laws, as in case of abnormal nervous conditions, are thus placed in the right light for later study and explanation. If this, however, be the case, our entire conception of psychical causation must be altered accordingly. The physio- logical facts and the psychical dispositions do not merely serve to fill out gaps in the series of inner or mental causes and effects, but they are an essential part of every causal series known to the psychologist. We cannot, for instance, maintain, as our author does, that, since we are primarily conscious of the efficaciousness of our will, we are able to arrive at a belief in physical reality, or in other sorts of reality, in so far as we become aware of limitations to this efficaciousness of consciousness, and so of conditions im- posed upon our will and alien to it. For our will can be viewed as causally efficacious only after we have already formed the con- ception of physical and of psycho-physical causes. With the alteration of our author's theory, thus rendered necessary, would change very much indeed of his doctrine as to the dynamics of consciousness. Meanwhile, however, as our author may well insist, the facts of consciousness, expounded in his chapter on Mental Activity, remain. There is attention in consciousness ; there is, what all men agree to call, striving for ends ; there is, unquestionably, the mode of consciousness which he denominates conation. What account shall one give of this mode unless one regards it, with our author, as an instance of the efficaciousness of the conscious process, which thus shows itself as at least partly " self-sustain- ing "? Must one fall back upon the position of the associationists? Must one define all this as due to a mere " passive " sequence of states ? I reply by saying that our author comes very often so near to what seems to me the truth in this matter that I wonder to find him caring for that mere bauble, that mere abstraction of indirect experience, called " efficaciousness," when the rich inner life which he is analysing furnishes to him the characters that he so elaborately defines, that, as against the associationist, he so admir- ably characterises, and that constitute, after all, vhat really makes