Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 01.djvu/135

ACTION. we are startled: and the jump and wince are inexplicable unless they are the degenerate descendants of voluntary actions, the last reflex remnants of the cowering and shrinking and leaping aside of the frightened animal.

The only point of fact which this second point of view leaves unexplained is the mode of origin of the first impulse. How and under what conditions the primeval organism became conscious of the impulse to move, and organic movement appeared in the natural world, we cannot say. But neither is psychology called upon to say. No science explains its own data; it takes them for granted. As, therefore, the physicist assumes the mechanical universe, and the biologist the phenomena of life, so may the psychologist assume without cavil the existence of mind. Granted the starting-point, and the rest follows easily enough. The first organic movement is an "action upon presentation," an action whose motive (the impulse) is given with the presentation to the animal of a pleasantly or unpleasantly toned stimulus. Out of this grows impulsive action proper, an action whose motive is blended of three ideas: that of the stimulus, the original motive-idea; that of the result of movement, of pleasurable accomplishment: and that of the moving itself, the "active experience" of the first theory. The course of development beyond impulsive action takes two directions. Upward. toward greater mentality, it rises to the more complex forms of voluntary action: to selective action, in which there is a conflict of impulses, a period of deliberation, resulting in the victory of some one (the actual) motive over other less strong (potential) motives; and to volitional action, in which the conflict is not between impulse and impulse, but between an impulse to movement on the one hand and a group of ideas prompting to no-action on the other. Downward, toward less mentality, the impulsive action degenerates into the reflex movement. Selective and volitional action, as we have seen, may also degenerate; choice and resolve become automatic: the complex action slips back, first of all into an impulsive act, and finally into a secondary reflex. Note the light which this view of the development of action throws upon the problems of animal psychology (q.v.). Bethe thinks that ants and bees are automata, while popular psychology dowers them with all sorts of conscious motives and purposes. Now, ants and bees prove, on trial, to be unintelligent: they cannot learn to make new adaptations. On the other hand, the adaptations which they have already learned are of an extremely complicated character. It has been assumed, therefore, by certain authorities that these creatures represent the final stage in a retrogressive development from a fairly high level of mentality. According to this theory popular psychology is right, in that ants and bees once possessed a good deal of mind: it is wrong in interpreting their present movements as voluntary actions. If it be objected that the unicellular organisms, the most primitive forms of life, should (on the present theory) show signs of rudimentary impulsive action, and that Jennings's paramecia proved, on the contrary, to be as automatic as Bethe's ants, the reply is that these protozoa, simple as they are, have as long a line of ancestry as we have ourselves; and that the less mind there is to start with the less will be the fall from impulse to the reflex. It is asserted strongly by the supporters of this hypothesis that if a sound view of mental evolution is to be attained, the investigator must accept the proposition that all animals have had mind. Whether or not they have it now depends upon the direction which their development has taken — upward, toward physiological adaptability and elaboration of mental process, or downward, toward specific adaptation and the lapse of consciousness.

2. We have already said something by way of analysis of the "typical" motive to action, the impulse. On its intellectual side, this motive, in complete form, contains the three ideas (1) of the object which evokes the movement, (2) of the movement itself, and (3) of the result which the movement accomplishes. The affective accompaniment of this group of ideas may be pleasurable or unpleasurable, but must always be the one or the other: we may jump for joy or from fright, but we do not jump when our mood is that of indifference. The essential thing in the active consciousness, however, is an apperception of (attention to) some one of the ideas contained in the motive. (See ; .) (a) In the case of primitive action (action upon presentation) we must suppose that the idea of object is the idea that stands in the focus of attention: the impulsive action is indistinguishable from the movement that expresses emotion. (See ; .) "The universal animal impulses — the impulses of nutrition, of revenge, of sex, of protection, etc. — are indubitably the earliest forms of emotion." (Wundt.) The hungry animal perceives food; its attention is held by this perception; it is pleasurably moved by the perception; and bodily movement toward the food-supply results. (b) As the organism grows in experience of movement, the impulse becomes more complex, and the focus of attention shifts to the idea of our own movement (action upon representation); so that we may lay it down as a law of analytical psychology that the condition of voluntary action is an apperception of the movement-idea. We think of ourselves as moving, and find that we have moved. (c) At a still later stage, when the voluntary action is taking the downward path toward the secondary reflex, the idea of movement fuses with the idea of result into an indissoluble whole. It is now the idea of result that holds the attention. We feel a draught, and rise at once to close the window, thinking neither of the object of movement, the window, nor of the muscular movements that take us to it. but simply of the result of the action, the avoidance of a cold. So the emphasis shifts from term to term of the threefold complex; from idea of object to idea of movement, and from that again to idea of result. But the motive remains in principle the same thing: an affectively toned group of sense-material, given in the state of attention.

The conscious antecedents of the higher forms of voluntary action are naturally more complicated. In place of the triad of simple ideas we have, in the conflict of impulses that precedes volitional and selective action, elaborate systems or constellations of ideas, representations of the total "situation" in which we find ourselves. In place of the simple pleasantness or unpleasantness of the impulse, we have equally elaborate