Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/66

50 mounts one has perhaps a pretty definite visual image of himself in balance and in motion. This image persists as a desirability. On the other hand, there comes into play at once the consciousness of the familiar motor adjustments,—for the most part, related to walking. The two sets of sensations refuse to coincide, and the result is an amount of stress and strain relevant to the most serious problems of the universe. Or, again, the conflict becomes so unregulated that the image of the balance disappears, and one finds himself with only a lot of 'muscular' sensations at hand; the effort entirely vanishes. I have taken an extreme case, but surely every one is familiar, in dealing with unfamiliar occupations, of precisely this alternation of effort, out of all proportion to the objective significance of the end, with the complete mind-wandering and failure of endeavor. If the sense of effort is the sense of incompatibility between two sets of sensory images, one of which stands for an end to be reached, or a fulfilment of a habit, while the other represents the experiences which intervene in reaching the end, these phenomena are only what are to be expected. But if we start from a 'spiritual' theory of effort, I know of no explanation which is anything more than an hypostatized repetition of the facts to be explained.

It probably has already occurred to the reader, that when the theory of the sensational character of the consciousness of effort is analyzed, instead of being merely thrown out at large, the feeling that it deals common-sense a blow in the face, disappears. If we state the foregoing analysis in objective, instead of in psychical terms, it just says that effort is the feeling of opposition existing between end and means. The kinaesthetic image of qualitative nature (i.e., of color, sound, contact) stands for the end, whether consciously desired, or as furnishing the culmination of habit. The 'muscular' sensations represent the means, the experiences to which value is not attached on their own account, but as intermediaries to an intrinsically valuable consciousness.