61. Much of what has been said in the preceding chapter respecting the passive side of the organism is equally applicable to the active side. Our actions are classed as voluntary and involuntary mainly in reference to their being consciously or unconsciously performed; but not wholly so, for there are many involuntary actions of which we are distinctly conscious, and many voluntary actions of which we are at times sub-conscious and unconscious. I do not propose here to open the long and arduous discussion as to what constitutes Volition, my present purpose being simply that of fixing the meaning of terms, so that the question of Automatism may not be complicated by their ambiguities. “Voluntary” and “involuntary” are, like “conscious” and “unconscious,” correlative terms; but commonly, instead of being understood as indicating differences of degree in phenomena of the same order, they are supposed to indicate differences of kind—a new agent, the Will, being understood in the one case to direct the Mechanism which suffices without direction in the other.

62. This interpretation is unphysiological and unpsychological, since it overlooks the fact that both voluntary and involuntary actions belong to the same order of phenomena, i.e. those of the sentient organism. Both involve the same efficient cause, i.e. co-operant conditions. We draw a line of demarcation between the two abstractions—as between all abstractions—but the concrete processes they symbolize have no such demarcation. Just as the thought which at one moment passes unconsciously, at another consciously, is in itself the same thought, and the same neural process; so the action which at one moment is voluntary, and at another involuntary, is itself the same action, performed by the same mechanism. The incitation which precedes, and the feeling which accompanies the action, belong to the accessory mechanisms, and may be replaced by other incitations and other feelings; as the fall of an apple is the same event, involving the same conditions, i.e. efficient cause, whether the occasional cause be a gust of wind or the gardener’s scissors, and whether the fall be seen and heard or not. I may utter words intentionally and consciously, and I may utter the same words automatically, unconsciously; I may wink voluntarily, and wink involuntarily. There are terms to express these differences; but they do not express a difference in the efficient agencies.

63. Many writers seem to think that the involuntary actions belong to the physical mechanical order, because they are not stimulated by cerebral incitations, and cannot be regulated or controlled by such incitations—or as the psychologists would say, because Consciousness in the form of Will is no agent prompting and regulating such actions. But I think this untenable. The actions cannot belong to the mechanical order so long as they are the actions of a vital mechanism, and so long as we admit the broad distinction between organisms and anorganisms. Whether they have the special character of Consciousness or not, they have the general character of sentient actions, being those of a sentient mechanism. And this becomes the more evident when we consider the gradations of the phenomena. Many, if not all, of those actions which are classed under the involuntary were originally of the voluntary class—either in the individual or his ancestors; but having become permanently organized dispositions—the pathways of stimulation and reaction having been definitely established—they have lost that volitional element (of hesitation and choice) which implies regulation and control. But even here a slight change in the habitual conditions will introduce a disturbance in the process which may awaken Consciousness, and the sense of effort, sometimes even causing control. An instinctive or an automatic action may be thus changed, or arrested. Take as an example one of the unequivocally automatic actions, that of Breathing. It is called automatic because, like the actions of an automaton, it is performed by a definitely constructed mechanism, always working in the same way when stimulated and left to itself. There must of course be a sense of effort in every impulse which has resistance to overcome, organs to be moved; but the mechanism of Breathing is so delicately adjusted, that the sense of effort is reduced to a minimum, and we are unconscious of it, or sub-conscious of it. Nevertheless, without altering the rate or amplitude of the inspirations and expirations, we become distinctly conscious of them, and, moreover, within certain limits we can control them, so that the Breathing passes from the involuntary to the voluntary class.

64. Pass on to other examples. What action can be more involuntary than the rhythmic movements of the heart and the contractions of the iris? Compared with the actions of the tongue or limbs, these seem riveted by an iron necessity, freed from all consciousness and control. Yet the movements of the heart are not only stimulated by sensations and thoughts, they are also capable of being felt; and the movements both of heart and iris are not wholly removed from our control. That we do not habitually control (that is, interfere with) the action of the heart, the contraction of the iris, or the activity of a gland, is true; it is on this account that such actions are called involuntary; they obey the immediate stimulus. But it is an error to assert that these actions cannot be controlled, that they are altogether beyond the interference of other centres, and cannot by any effort of ours be modified. It is an error to suppose these actions are essentially distinguished from the voluntary movement of the hands. We have acquired a power of definite direction in the movements of the hands, which renders them obedient to our will; but this acquisition has been of slow laborious growth. If we were asked to use our toes as we use our fingers—to grasp, paint, sew, or write with them, we should find it not less impossible to control the movements of the toes in these directions, than to contract the iris, or cause a burst of perspiration to break forth. Certain movements of the toes are possible to us; but unless the loss of our fingers has made it necessary that we should use our toes in complicated and slowly acquired movements, we can do no more with them than the young infant can do with his fingers. Yet men and women have written, sewed, and painted with their toes. All that is requisite is that certain links should be established between sensations and movements; by continual practice these links are established; and what is impossible to the majority of men, becomes easy to the individual who has acquired this power. This same power can be acquired over what are called the organic actions; nevertheless the habitual needs of life do not tend towards such acquisition, and without some strong current setting in that direction, or some peculiarity of organization rendering it easy, it is never acquired. In ordinary circumstances the number of those who can write with their toes is extremely rare, the urgent necessity which would create such a power being rare; and rare also are the examples of those who have any control over the movement of the iris, or the action of a gland; but both rarities exist.

It would be difficult to choose a more striking example of reflex action than the contraction of the iris of the eye under the stimulus of light;214 and to ordinary men, having no link established which would guide them, it is utterly impossible to close the iris by any effort. It would be not less impossible to the hungry child to get on the chair and reach the food on the table, until that child had learned how to do so. Yet there are men who have learned how to contract the iris. The celebrated Fontana had this power; which is possessed also by a medical man now living at Kilmarnock—Dr. Paxton—a fact authenticated by no less a person than Dr. Allen Thomson.215 Dr. Paxton can contract or expand the iris at will, without changing the position of his eye, and without an effort of adaptation to distance.

To move the ears is impossible to most men. Yet some do it with ease, and all could learn to do it. Some men have learned to “ruminate” their food; others to vomit with ease; and some are said to have the power of perspiring at will.216 Now, if once we recognize a link of sensation and motion, we recognize a possible source of control; and if the daily needs of life were such that to fulfil some purpose the action of the heart required control, we should learn to control it. Some men have, without such needs, learned how to control it. The eminent physiologist, E. F. Weber of Leipzig, found that he could completely check the beating of his heart. By suspending his breath and violently contracting his chest, he could retard the pulsations; and after three or five beats, unaccompanied by any of the usual sounds, it was completely still. On one occasion he carried the experiment too far, and fell into a syncope. Cheyne, in the last century, recorded the case of a patient of his own who could at will suspend the beating of his pulse, and always fainted when he did so.

65. It thus appears that even the actions which most distinctly bear the character recognized as involuntary—uncontrollable—are only so because the ordinary processes of life furnish no necessity for their control. We do not learn to control them, though we could do so, to some extent; nor do we learn to control the motions of our ears, although we could do so. And while it appears that the involuntary actions can become voluntary, it is familiar to all that the voluntary actions tend, by constant repetition, to become involuntary. Thus involuntary actions, under certain limitations, may be controlled; on the other hand, the voluntary are incapable of being controlled under the urgency of direct stimulation. Both are reflexes.

Inasmuch as almost all actions are the products of stimulated nerve-centres, it is obvious that these actions are reflex—reflected from those centres. It matters not whether I wink because a sensation of dryness, or because an idea of danger, causes the eyelid to close: the act is equally reflex. The nerve-centre which supplies the eyelid with its nerve has been stimulated; the stimuli may be various, the act is uniform. At one time the stimulus is a sensation of dryness, at another an idea of danger, at another the idea of communicating by means of a wink with some one present; in each case the stimulus is reflected in a muscular contraction. Sensations excite other sensations; ideas excite other ideas; and one of these ideas may issue in an action of control. But the restraining power is limited, and cannot resist a certain degree of urgency in the original stimulus. I can, for a time, restrain the act of winking, in spite of the sensation of dryness; but the reflex which sets going this restraining action will only last a few seconds; after which, the urgency of the external stimulus is stronger than that of the reflex feeling—the sensation of dryness is more imperious than the idea of resistance—and the eyelid drops.

If a knife be brought near the arm of a man who has little confidence in the friendly intentions of him that holds it, he shrinks, and the shrinking is “involuntary,” i.e. in spite of his will. Let him have confidence, and he does not shrink, even when the knife touches his skin. The idea of danger is not excited in the second case, or if excited, is at once banished by another idea. Yet this very man, who can thus repress the involuntary shrinking when the knife approaches his arm, cannot repress the involuntary winking when the same friend approaches a finger to his eye. In vain he prepares himself to resist that reflex action; in vain he resolves to resist the impulse; no sooner does the finger approach, than down flashes the eyelid. Many men, and most women, would be equally unable to resist shrinking on the approach of a knife: the association of the idea of danger with the knife would bear down any previous resolution not to shrink. It is from this cause that timorous women tremble at the approach of firearms. An association is established in their minds which no idea is powerful enough to loosen. You may assure them the gun is not loaded; “that makes very little difference,” said a naÏve old lady to a friend of mine. They tremble, as the child trembles when he sees you put on the mask. These illustrations show that the urgency of any one idea may, like the urgency of a sensation, bear down the resistance offered by some other idea; as the previous illustrations showed that an idea could restrain or control the action which a sensation or idea would otherwise have produced. According to the doctrines current, the Will is said to be operative when an idea determines an action; and yet all would agree that the winking which was involuntary when the idea of danger determined it, was voluntary when the idea of communicating with an accomplice in some mystification determined it.

66. There is no real and essential distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions. They all spring from Sensibility. They are all determined by feeling. It is convenient, for common purposes, to designate some actions as voluntary; but this is merely a convenience; no psychological nor physiological insight is gained by it; an analysis of the process discloses no element in a voluntary action which is not to be found in an involuntary action—except in the origin or degree of stimulation. In ordinary language it is convenient to mark a distinction between my raising my arm because I will to raise it for some definite purpose, and my raising it because a bee has stung me; it is convenient to say, “I will to write this letter,” and “this letter is written against my will—I have no will in the matter.” But Science is more exacting when it aims at being exact; and the philosopher, analyzing these complex actions, will find that in each case certain muscular groups have been set in action by different sensational or ideational stimuli. The action itself is that of a neuro-muscular mechanism, which mechanism works in the same way, whatever be the source of the original impulse. The stimulation may be incited directly from the periphery, or indirectly from a remote centre; and the action may be arrested by a peripheral or central stimulation: the reflex which ordinarily follows the excitation of a sensory nerve will be modified, or arrested, if some other nerve be at the same time stimulated. (See Law of Arrest, Prob. II. § 190.)

67. All actions are reflex, all are the operations of a mechanism, all are sentient, because the mechanism has Sensibility as its vital property. In thus preserving the integrity of the order of vital phenomena, and keeping them classified apart from physical and chemical phenomena, we by no means set aside the useful distinctions expressed in the terms voluntary and involuntary; any more than we set aside the distinction of vertebrate and invertebrate when both are classed under Animal, and separated from Plant, or Planet.

The mechanisms of the special Senses respond in special reactions; the mechanisms of special actions have also their several responses. The tail responds to stimulation with lateral movements, the chest with inspiration and expiration, and so on. These responses are called automatic, and have this in common with the actions of automata that they are uniform, and do not need the co-operation of Consciousness, though they do need the operation of Sensibility, and are thereby distinguished from the actions of automata. The facial muscles, and the limbs, also respond to stimulation in uniform ways, but owing to the varieties of stimulation the actions are more variable, and have more the character of volitional movements. With this greater freedom of possible action comes the eminently mental character of choice. In the cerebral rehearsal of an act not yet performed—its mental prevision—as when we intend to do something, yet for the moment arrest the act, so that there is only a nascent excitation of the motor process, there is a peculiar state of Consciousness expressive of this state of the mechanism: we call the prevision a motive—and it becomes a motor when the intention is realized, the nascent excitation becomes an unchecked impulse. The abstract of all motives we call Will. A motive is a volition in the sphere of the Intellect. In the sphere of Emotion it is a motor. Hence we never speak of the Will of a mollusc, or the motives of an insect, only of their sensations and motors. Yet it is obvious that the reflex in operation when a snail shrinks at the approach of an object is essentially similar to the reflex in operation when the baby shrinks, and this again is still more similar to that in operation when the boy shrinks: the boy has the idea of danger, which neither baby nor snail can have; the idea is a motive, which can be controlled by another idea; the baby and the snail can have no such motive, no such control—are they therefore automata?

68. If I see that a donkey has wandered into my garden, the motive which determines me to take a stick and with it drive the donkey away is a cerebral rehearsal of the effects which will follow my act. The sight of the donkey has roused disagreeable feelings, and these suggest possible means of alleviation; out of these possibilities—reproductions of former experiences—I choose one. But if I seize the stick with which some one is threatening me, I do not pause to choose, I snatch automatically without hesitation. Yet this unreflecting automatic act is itself as truly volitional as my seizing the stick to drive away the donkey—it is the motor which has been organized in me by previous experiences—it is the consequence of an emotion, not of a deliberation; and it has not been determined by any clear prevision of consequences. Feeling inspires, and feeling guides my movements, so that if my snatch has missed the stick, I snatch again, or duck under. This is the kind of Volition we ascribe to animals. It is a great part of our own. By insensible degrees, acts which originally were prompted by motives sink into the automatic class prompted by motors. When an angry man snatches up a knife, doffs bystanders aside, and rushes on his enemy to stab him, he does not distinctly prefigure the final result, he only obeys each motor, and is conscious of each step; but had he planned the murder he would have foreseen the end, and this prevision would have been the motive. The angry man is struck with horror at the sight of the bleeding corpse, and passionately declares he did not mean to kill. Nor did he will the consequences of his act, yet he certainly willed each separate step—he recognized the knife, saw the bystanders, knew they would interfere with him, willed to push them aside. He may be right in declaring that the act was involuntary; but assuredly it was not purely mechanical.

69. Again, we are not conscious of the separate sensations which guide speech or writing; we cannot properly be said to will the utterance of each tone, or the formation of each letter. Are these processes mechanical and not volitional? By no means. We know that they were laboriously learned by long tentative efforts, each of which was accompanied by distinct consciousness. We also know that now when the mechanism is so easy in its adjustment as to suggest automatism, there needs but a slight alteration in the conditions to make us distinctly conscious of the processes—the wrong word spoken, or one letter ill formed, suffices to arrest the easy working of the mechanism. A similar mechanism operates in thinking, which also lapses from the conscious and voluntary to the unconscious and involuntary state. The logical process of Judgment is as purely a reflex from one neural group to another, as the physiological process of co-ordination. In ordinary thinking we are as little conscious of the particular steps—our interest being concentrated on the result—as we are of the particular stages of an action. The adjustments of the mechanism of Reproduction and Association are set going by a motive, and kept going by psychological motors. And here—as in bodily actions—there is often a conflict between motive and motors—between the foreseen result, and the available means of reaching it—the motors usually prevailing because they represent the active side of the mechanism. Thus when an oculist wishes to examine a patient’s eye, he does not tell him to give a particular direction to his eye, knowing that the motive to do so will not suffice; instead of this he simply moves his own hand in the desired direction, certain that the eye will by reflex irresistibly follow it. Nay, there are sometimes such anomalies of innervation that the eye, instead of obeying the motive, moves in a contrary direction. Meschede mentions a patient whose movements were mostly of this anomalous kind: when he willed to move the eyes to the right, they moved to the left; when he willed to move them up, they moved down. It was thus also with his hands and feet. Yet he was distinctly conscious that his intention had been frustrated, and that he acted “because he could not help it.”217 How insensibly a motive sinks into a motor, that is to say, a voluntary into an involuntary act, may be recognized in speech, writing, singing, walking, etc., and in the incessant movements of the eye in fixing objects. Aubert has well remarked that we only give definite movements to the eye when we wish to see an object distinctly. Whenever the indistinct vision suffices—as in walking through the streets occupied in conversation or thought—we make no such movements; but no sooner does any object excite our attention, than the effort to fix that object at once excites the necessary reflex.218 70. By the Will, then, we must understand the abstract generalized expression of the impulses which determine actions, when those impulses have an ideal origin; by Volition the still more generalized expression of all impulses which determine actions. The one class is that of motives with ideal elements; the other that of motors with sensational or emotional elements. But both are mental states, both are neural processes in a sentient organism; neither is mechanical, except in so far as all actions are expressible in mechanical terms. For convenience we class actions as reflex, automatic, involuntary, unconscious, voluntary, and conscious. If we separate the reflex from the voluntary, we need not therefore dissociate the former from Sensibility; and the reason why we ought not to separate it is that we know it to be sense-guided from first to last, although the sensations may escape discrimination. The feeling of Effort, which was formerly felt when an action was performed, may have become so minimized that it is too faint for more than a momentary consciousness, too evanescent for the memory to retain it; yet the feeling must always be operant when its mechanism is in action. The ease with which the mechanism works does not change the adjustment of its elements, nor alter its character. The facile unobtrusive performance of a vital function does not change it from a vital to a mechanical act. Mr. Spencer seems to me to express himself ambiguously when he says: “Just as any set of psychical changes originally displaying Memory, Reason, and Feeling cease to be conscious, rational, and emotional as fast as they by repetition grow closely organized, so do they at the same time pass beyond the sphere of Volition. Memory, Reason, Feeling, and Will disappear in proportion as psychical changes become automatic”219—for while it is perfectly true that we only call those psychical changes “automatic” which have lost the special qualities called “conscious, rational, and emotional,” it is not less true that they remain from first to last psychical changes, and are thereby distinguished from physical changes. To suppose that they pass from the psychical to the physical by frequent repetition would lead to the monstrous conclusion that when a naturalist has by laborious study become so familiarized with the specific marks of an animal or plant that he can recognize at a glance a particular species, or recognize from a single character the nature of the rest, the rapidity and certainty of this judgment proves it to be a mechanical, not a mental act. The intuition with which a mathematician sees the solution of a problem would then be a mechanical process, while the slow and bungling hesitation of the tyro in presence of the same problem would be a mental process: the perfection of the organism would thus result in its degradation to the level of a machine!

The operations of the intellect may furnish us with an illustration. Ideas are symbols of sensations. The idea of a horse is an abstraction easily traceable to concrete sensations, yet as an abstraction is so different a state of feeling that we only identify it with its concretes by a careful study of its stages of evolution, namely, sensation, image, reproduced images resembling yet differing from the original sensation, a coalescence of their resemblances, and finally the substitution of a verbal symbol for these images. With this symbol the intellect operates, and sometimes operates so exclusively with it that not the faintest trace of image or sensation is appreciable—the word horse takes the place of the image in the sequence of sensorial processes, just as the image takes the place of the sensation. It does this as a neural equivalent. In the same way we substitute verbal symbols for a bag of sovereigns when we pay a creditor with a check; he pays the check away to another; and this monetary equivalent passes from hand to hand without a single coin making its appearance. Does the transaction cease to be commercial, monetary, in this substitution of signs? No; nor does a process cease to be psychical when an image is substituted for a sensation, and a verbal symbol for an image. This every one will admit. Must we not go further, and extend the admission to automatic actions which originally were voluntary, and have now lost all trace of ideal prevision, and almost all traces of accompanying consciousness? The motor mechanism has its symbols also; in this sense, that whereas the action which at first needed complex sensorial processes to set it going and keep it going, is now determined by a single one of those processes taking the place of their resultant. When a practised accountant runs his eye up a column of figures, he does not pause to realize the values of those figures by decomposing the symbols into their numerical units, he simply groups one symbol with another according to their intuited relations, and the final result is reached with a certainty not less, and a rapidity far greater, than if it had been reached by step-by-step verification. It is thus with the pianoforte-player. It is thus with all automatic performances, except those dependent on the connate adjustments of the mechanism.