Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/402

386 known facts. The first of these is the delay of reflex impulses in their passage through the spinal cord from the influence of the cerebrum and their quickened speed when the cerebrum is removed. The second is the heightening of reflex action during sleep when consciousness is suspended. But before free volition can be proved this inhibition must be of the higher ideational centres upon sensation, as already indicated, and this can be shown to be the case in a thousand ways. Every comparison between a present and a past experience involves it. We can safely affirm, then, that all the higher activities of consciousness are essentially inhibitive, to some extent perhaps in relation to reflexes, but more particularly in relation to sensational and emotional impulses, while they may be themselves per se impulsive as motives. But the fact we are interested in here is the interruption they produce in the ordinary causal series between stimulus and motor reaction. If this did not occur we should have no disproof of fatalism. The fact that it does occur, however, even if not always, explains the possibility of the other known fact; namely that of deliberation, which may be regarded as the continuance of intellectual activity after inhibition has interrupted the course of sensation and emotion, and which would be impossible if all action were reflex in its nature.

It will be a corollary to this view that freedom is proportioned to the extent to which the higher forms of consciousness inhibit the causal agency of the lower forms. Hence it would appear to have degrees, — a doctrine which we are fully prepared to accept, especially when we remark its exact conformity to the facts of observation. For instance, we have the intellectual man who has cultivated the predominance of ideational activity. He is a man who is most free from the influence of sensation and emotion upon the will. Inhibition and habit have suppressed all tendencies to a direct nexus between stimulus and volition. He is therefore free precisely in proportion to his independence of external influences, and the reflexes of sensation and emotion. Again, we have the impulsive type of character; such a person is more or less the subject of present impressions. He does not deliberate, but acts immediately as his circumstances incline him