Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/209

No. 2.] completely described when the idea of a movement is said to be succeeded in consciousness by the perception of the actual movement. In passing from one to the other we have the feeling of our own activity, which is as much an empirical fact as is a sensation or an idea. Dr. Münsterberg's theory is obliged either to treat this feeling as an illusion, or to identify it with the muscular sensations. But as exactly similar muscular sensations may arise without our having the feeling of our own activity, as for instance when the motor nerves are stimulated electrically, it is evident that certain concomitant phenomena are here taken for the will itself.

The intellectualist theory, seeking as it does to resolve all mental phenomena into sensations and ideas, has its source in that tendency to substantialize mental events which looks upon the soul as a mere "bundle of presentations," for us objects of passive contemplation. Our volitions must, on this theory, be presentations, and as such decomposable into sensations; and elements of will which are non-presentable must of necessity be non-existent. But this whole theory is one tissue of false assumptions. Consciousness is in no sense such a bundle of juxtaposed presentations. Presentations are not objects, but events, which come into and pass out of existence, and during their brief life undergo continual changes. The percipient subject, above all, is not an observer, standing opposite its own presentations and passively contemplating them, but an inseparable segment of the network of psychic events themselves.

The objects of psychology are, in short, one and all conscious processes or events. These we separate into two groups, those which represent the objects and events of the external world, namely, our presentations, and those which express our own attitude towards the latter. The second group of processes divides into two subordinate groups, some being felt to be mere passive experiences, namely, our feelings, others to be self-produced, namely, our acts of will. The will itself is nothing different from these self-produced processes. But what is meant by the word self-produced?

When we seek to explain an act of choice, and to say why this was chosen and not that, we find that the mental states which were actually present do not suffice for this purpose. The reason why a particular impulse determines an act never lies in the relative strength of the conflicting impulses alone, but also in that upon which their relative strength ultimately depends; namely, the total character of consciousness as determined by its past history. This finds expression in the resultant quality of that product of innumerable past experiences which we call the consciousness of self. As in the progress of evolution the latter comes to be more and more clearly recognized as the decisive factor in