Page:Outlines of Psychology (Wundt) 1907.djvu/235

 § 14. Volitional Processes. 205

move hunger, the struggle against enemies to appease the feeling of revenge, and other similar processes are original volitional processes of this kind. The emotions coming from sense-feelings, and the most widespread social emotions such as love, hate, anger, and revenge, are thus, both in men and animals, the common origin of will. A volition is dis- tinguished in such cases from an emotion only by the fact that the former has added to its emotional components an external act that gives rise to feelings which, through con- trast with the feelings contained in the emotion, bring the emotion itself to an end. The execution of the volitional act may then lead directly, as was originally always the case, or indirectly through an emotion of contrasted affective content, into the ordinary quiet flow of feelings. 3. The richer the ideational and affective contents of experience, the greater the variety of the emotions and the wider the sphere of volitions. There is no feeling or emo- tion which does not in some way prepare for a volitional act, or at least have some part in such a preparation. All feel- ings, even those of a relatively indifferent character, contain in some degree an effort towards or away from some end. This effort may be very general and aimed merely at the maintenance or removal of the present affective state. While volition appears as the most complex form of affective pro- cess, presupposing feelings and emotions as its components, still, we must not overlook, on the other hand, the fact that single feelings continually appear which do not unite to form emotions, and emotions appear which do not end in voli- tional acts. In the total interconnection of psychical pro- cesses, however, these three stages are conditions of one another and form the related parts of a single process which is complete only when it becomes a volition. In this sense a feeling may be thought of as the beginning of a volition, or a volition may be thought of as a composite affective