Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/391

No. 4.] alternatives, because it is the necessary effect of the stronger motive. If we consider the order of events to be stimulus, emotion or desire, and volition, and then admit that the emotion or desire is both the necessary effect of its antecedent and the necessary cause of what accompanies or follows it we have a series of phenomena under the law of causation and we do not seem to require an initiative force between the first and the last term to account for the volition. But it is precisely at this point that the subreption occurs. It is true that we do speak of emotions and desires as "motives" to action, but not as mere states of consciousness unaffected by the determination of attention and choice. Emotions are reflexes of action and so are concomitants or effects of functional exercise. They do not necessarily issue in a particular volition as soon as they enter into consciousness, unless the intellect after a shorter or longer deliberation permits it. Pleasure and pain, love, fear, anger, etc., do not issue in any special volition by virtue of their presence in consciousness or of any immediately initiative power they possess. They are the necessary effects of organic or mental action, but their existence, even as conditions of volition, does not empower them to produce it as an inevitable effect in a causal series; that is, they are not efficient or active causes of volition until they are supplemented by what may be called "impulsive ideas," and even then are mere attendants and indices of the real impulsive force. We often speak of pleasure and pain as motives of conduct, but the fact is that as present states they are either never such or can be such only by considering every volition or act merely reflex. It is in reality the idea of pleasure and pain, not the actual present pleasure and pain that is the motive to volition. This is of course a truism, and yet the significance of it is totally ignored when speaking of emotions as "motives" of conduct. If we consider the emotions, merely as present states, to be "motives" of volition, we conceive them as identical in impulsive power with the instincts and reflexes. This is to think and speak of them as the efficient causes of volition. But a motive as properly understood in philosophic discussion must be a final cause, whatever may be said about it as an efficient "motive."