Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 01.djvu/134

ACTION. capacity other than a trustee, or against one whose duty it was to render an account to the plaintiff, to compel the defendant to render an account and to pay the amount due on such accounting.

ACTION. In psychology, a term used broadly to cover all forms of muscular movement. We speak, e.g., of the action of the heart, or reflex action, etc., as well as of impulsive or voluntary action. There is, however, a growing tendency to reserve the word action for such bodily movements as have conscious antecedents and concomitants (movements for which there are conscious motives, and of which we are conscious, as they run their course in time), and to employ the general term "movement" for movements which are of an unconscious, purely physiological, character. We shall therefore speak in this article of impulsive and voluntary action, but of reflex movement.

The problem which action sets to psychology is twofold. We have, in the first place, to trace the genesis and development of action; and in the second to analyze the active consciousness, to determine the constituent processes in the various forms of motive.

1. There are two opposed theories of the genesis of action. The first asserts that all conscious actions have developed from reflex movements. The reflex movement is the direct and definite response of the organism to a particular stimulus. A frog whose brain and medulla have been removed will draw up its leg if the foot be pinched; the pupil of the human eye contracts under the influence of light, and expands again as the light is diminished. Mechanical and unconscious movements of this kind are, the theory holds, older than consciousness. When mind appears, it finds such movements ready to its hand; it avails itself of them for conscious purposes. So the animal's movements, at first automatic and simple, grow more and more complex, and have more and more of the element of consciousness imported into them. The main arguments for the position are as follows. (a) Spontaneous movements are to be observed in children and young animals: movements that are neither reflex movements nor voluntary actions, but random discharges of the excess of energy stored in the healthy organism. These movements furnish a varied supply of active experience, certain items of which must, by the law of chance, prove to be positively pleasurable, while others will at least be less unpleasant than the experiences preceding them. Whenever active experience and pleasure are thus coincident, attention is drawn to the movement, which is elaborated into voluntary action. (b) From the physiological point of view, the movements of the lowest organisms, as well as the movements carried out by means of the lower nerve-centres of higher organisms, are of the reflex type. And even the most complex of voluntary actions can be assimilated to this type on the neural side; for the physical correlate of such action is simply the reflex arc. with its central portion made longer and more circuitous.

Neither of these arguments is, however, free from objections. In the first place, different observers differ as to the range and scope of the spontaneous movements of infancy. Some restrict them within very narrow limits, where the play of chance coincidence, would be inconsiderable; others assert that they can, one and all, be reduced to incipient voluntary actions and imperfect hereditary reflexes. Moreover, the theory presupposes that the sensations and perceptions aroused by moving appear, in point of time, before the pleasure achieved by the movement or the voluntary impulse toward it. But this means that mind is built up piecemeal, whereas there is reason to think that consciousness is a single tissue, every strand of which is given with every other. Again, it is difficult to understand the mechanism by which pleasurable movements are selected. Granted that a movement chances to bring pleasure, how is its repetition brought about? Can we form any clear idea of the way in which a motive is prefixed to the sensation series? As for the second argument, it is asserted as evident that the simplest form of sensory-motor coördination need not be the earliest. There is a primitive simplicity: but there is also a simplicity of reduction and refinement. Again, the statement that the movements of the lowest organisms are reflex in character is said to beg the question: the original theory assumes outright that there is a strict parallel between the growth of the race and the growth of the individual, between phylogeny and ontogeny, and does not take into account the fact that the individual comes into the world endowed with a rich inheritance of neuro-muscular coördinations. And, lastly, even if the neural substrate of voluntary action be in structure no more than a highly complex reflex arc, still the opponents of the theory point out functional differences: the reflex is unconscious, while the functioning of the central cells of the voluntary arc is accompanied by consciousness. So we come face to face once more with our original problem.

The alternative theory, which we may now examine, affirms that the earliest organic movements are, in principle, voluntary actions. Mind, according to this theory, is as old as life, and the first movements of living matter are impulsive actions, i.e., actions prompted by a single determining motive. The arguments which this position brings into the field are as follows. (a) All reflex and instinctive movements show signs of adaptation; they subserve a particular end or purpose; they are definite and appropriate responses to certain circumstances of the animal's environment. Now, in the first place, primitive movements should be vague and purposeless: it is not easy to conceive of a movement that should be at once rudimentary and economical. And, in the second place, our best criterion of the presence of mind in a living creature is the creature's capacity of adaptation, of learning. The reflex, pointing as it does to a process of adaptation in the past, points also to the existence of a past mind. In a word, reflex movements appear to be degenerate, mechanized impulsive actions. (b) There can be no doubt that such mechanization is possible. We are constantly in the course of our everyday life reducing voluntary actions to "secondary reflexes": our pen dips itself in the accustomed inkstand, our coat buttons itself, our bicycle balances itself, without any of the conscious attention that we gave them when the movements were new. Further, what we see happening here in the course of a few days or weeks has happened also in the life of the race. We wince when we are ashamed, and jump when