Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/397

No. 4.] to Mr. Spencer's admission, ought to increase central activity. Yet we are willing to grant, so far as our present contention is concerned, that this form of inhibition is of no special importance to the problem of freedom. So far as it merely establishes physical equilibrium of the nervous system, it only produces a passive condition from which no inner spontaneous action may issue, either conscious or unconscious. But it is the higher form of inhibition, which is essentially the same in character as the lower, as a restraint upon reflexes in some instances, and most frequently upon the tendency to a fixed causal relation between sensations or emotions and volition, and which renders deliberation possible — it is this form of inhibition that affects the problem of freedom in a more important way. The diminution of a pain by a new impression, the restraint of muscular action by a new sensation, the modification of an emotion or desire by a change of attention, the interruption of any impulse from a sensation by the memory of consequences — these are incidents which show that there is no absolutely invariable causal influence between a given stimulus or sensation and a supposed motor reaction. Thus the sight of a candle may be followed, as is frequently the case with infants, by an effort to handle it. But after the first experience at this dangerous work the sight of the same object rather awakens restraint. The burn in the first instance is associated with the perception of the candle and the memory of the pain is a deterrent of volition, showing that, after all, it was not the sensation in the first case that was the cause of the experiment, but rather some idea which was incidental to that occurrence. Hence there is no sensation, no pleasure or pain, which acts as the sole efficient cause of volition. The sensation or other state is either utilized to indicate the safety of impulsive action, or any tendency which experience may have happened to favor in its mediating influence on volition is inhibited, until the mind may read aright the situation, when the "motive" becomes one that is furnished by the ego and not by the non-ego. As we have remarked, and as all modern psychology shows, there is such an intimate connection between stimulus and motor changes