Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/154

 142 TH. RIBOT'S MALADIES DE LA VOLONTE. source of the active tendencies is external circumstances, the environment, education, in the widest sense of this term. It follows at once from this view that there is no room for undeter- mined or unmotived action. Considered as a state of conscious- ness, choice is for our author simply a kind of affirmation or negation, which in itself has no more efficacy than a judgment which it resembles. The real motor is the sum of organised tendencies acting in a certain way. Indeed to one who, like M. Ribot, looks at a voluntary action as a phenomenon in time con- joined with organic processes, there is plainly no meaning in the expression ' undetermined action '. Such a view is necessary to one who is going to study the pathology of volition ; and in its turn is abundantly illustrated by the results of such study. M. Ribot begins by distinguishing between two great groups of pathological conditions. The will may be either uprooted or destroyed. The study of the first group precedes that of the second. Here, again, we can distinguish two main kinds of enfeeblement : (1) by defect of impulse ; (2) by excess of im- pulse. The former variety is illustrated by the case of De Quincey, as well as by other cases distinctly recognised as instances of disease. There is still the form of volition, the ' I will,' but no corresponding impulsive force to give effect to the mandate. The patient affected by this debility often shows a clear consciousness of it, and an anxiety to carry out a resolve lest the executive power fail him. In these cases the intelligence and the muscular power are intact, and the incapability to act is distinctly due to absence of active impulse. As M. Ribot observes, disease here " creates exceptional conditions, unrealis- able by any other means ; it splits up the man, annihilates the individual reaction, respects the rest ; it produces for us, as far as this is possible, a being reduced to pure intelligence ". There is but one explanation of this state of things, namely a diminution of the process of excitation in the motor centres which is correlated with an enfeeblement of the sensitive or emotive element. As one of Esquirol's patients put it : " This want of activity was due to the fact that my sensations were too feeble to exercise an influence on my will ". Here then we have the cause of the impotence in the suppression of the impulsive organic factor. M. Ribot considers that the patients who profess to feel an intensity of desire in this condition, are the subjects of an illusion. It is exactly this emotive or active element of desire which fails them. Besides these cases in which there is a complete extinction of impulse, there are others in which there is a measure of active tendency preserved, but this is more than counterbalanced by the abnormal quantity of inhibitory force. Such are the instances in which a morbid timidity or anxiety at once arrests active impulse. A curious variety of this species of disturbance is fear of open spaces (Platzangst), In this condition the patient is