Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/77

 64 J. WAED : identification, viz., the existence of a singular point, or a point d'arret, in what we may call the feeling-curve, where intense pleasure passes more or less abruptly into intense pain, while the intensity of the presentation continues to increase. 1 The real solution of the difficulty is more probably to be found in the distinction of the receptive and reactive phases of conscious activity, 2 or non-voluntary and voluntary atten- tion, including in this last, spite of the paradox, involuntary attention as well. There is unfortunately much uncertainty in the use of this term ' voluntary '. It is here used in the sense in which Prof. Bain uses it, viz., for all cases of interest, immediate and mediate as well. " The first," as he says, " is the voluntary impulse in its purest, most primitive and perennial aspect ; to hug a pleasant idea is as purely instinctive and untaught as anything can be ; the higher apparatus of the will as expressed by resolution, deliberation, purpose has no part in it " (MiND, xi. 477). J. S. Mill, on the other hand, as the following sentence will show, confines the term voluntary to cases of mediate interest : " Ideas which are not of themselves so painful or pleasurable as to fix the attention may have it fixed on them by a voluntary act " (I. c. p. 373). In so doing he is at one with most earlier writers, and apparently with Mr. Bradley. It is important to examine carefully the "primitive aspect" of the voluntary impulse, inasmuch as the essential character of volition is more likely to be apparent in it than in " the higher apparatus of the will," where it is overlaid by complications. If this be sound in point of method, it is then w^orth notice that the primitive outcome of feeling is muscular movement, and we are therefore prompted to inquire whether all volition, that is to say, all voluntary attention, is not of the nature of movement. Prof. Bain comes very near to such a generalisation, which indeed to the present writer seems a sound one, though this is not the place for a detailed array of proofs. But if all voluntary attention is of the nature of movement it will not do to call such movement muscular. It is unfortunate that the term ''muscular" has got such a hold on us: psychologically, muscles are as great an impertinence as nerves ; we know nothing of either. The common fact in all voluntary action alike seems to be a change in the distribution of attention under the influence of feeling : in the earliest forms of it 1 Cp. Wundt, PhysiologiscJie Psychologic, i. 468. 2 Against this distinction Mr. Bradley is moved to protest, on the ground that " it breaks up the life of the soul and divides it into active and passive factors ". Such a travesty of the facts is indeed a short and ready way of disposing of one of the oldest and most obvious distinctions in all psychology.