Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/398

382 that the changes seem to be explosions occurring in response to the stimulus. Consciousness naturally discharges itself upon the muscular system, as sensations are alarms against personal assault from the external world. Habit powerfully reinforces such a tendency and would make mere machines of us in a very short time were it not for inhibition. An experience which has once or twice, or more frequently, been the connecting link, as Mr. Spencer has shown, between stimulus and volition, will more readily repeat its action on each succeeding occasion, because mental and physical activity follow the lines of least resistance. But inhibition comes in with varying degrees of power to prevent habit from assuming absolute control of the subject, with many exceptions familiar to the student of psychology. It interrupts the tendency to direct and immediate transition from sensation or emotion into volition and offers opportunity for reflection. This is the only way in which a man can escape being the victim of any present state of mind, and in which he gains power to guide himself by the future rather than by the present moment. He never could decide the conflict between the present enjoyment and the future possible good except for the inhibition exercised by the idea of the latter upon the tendency to a mechanical realization of the former. Inhibition is thus an antagonistic force against the direct agency of stimuli and sensations to produce muscular activity, and thus establishes more or less of the equipoise necessary for deliberation and the formation of ideational motives. Ribot, who treats the freedom of the will with contempt, has emphasized the nature and influence of this phenomenon without realizing fully its significance. He betrays some consciousness of its importance, but mainly because the fact seems to show the existence in connection with absolutely all nervous activity of two opposing influences, one to produce and the other to prevent volition. But not having reckoned with the conception of the case in Figure 2, where ideational centres add to the forces capable of affecting action and where inhibition is represented, not as wholly forbidding volition, but as preventing the immediate passage of a stimulus or a sensation and emotion into