Action

The ordinary way of speaking is, that the Understanding and Will are two faculties of the mind; yet I suspect that this way of speaking of faculties has misled many into a confused notion of so many distinct agents in us, which had their several provinces and authorities, and did command, obey, and perform several actions, as so many distinct beings: which has been no small occasion of wrangling, obscurity and uncertainty in questions relating to them.—John Locke

§ 53. The Psychology of Action.—There seems to be a great gulf fixed between plants and animals, and you were probably surprised to read, on p. 13, that there are not a few psychologists who take the question of a plant-mind with scientific seriousness. If you ask yourself, now, wherein this gulf consists, you will find that it reduces in the main to a single point of difference: the higher plants are stationary organisms, the higher animals are motor. The plant stands still and has to wait for things to come to it; and its organisation fits the case; it spreads its organs over the widest possible space, and is all, so to say, on the outside. The animal moves; it goes to things; and its organisation is correspondingly different; the vital organs are packed away inside, where they are out of harm’s reach, and are distributed in such a way as to be easily carried. It would be strange, then, if movement—the great differential character of the animals—did not somehow fall within the range of psychology; and we know that it does; for we are continually hoping, fearing, resolving, refusing, wishing to do something, or feeling glad, sorry, satisfied, disappointed, resentful that the something has been done. Moreover, we have already made frequent reference to movement; we have spoken of the attitude of attention, of movement of the eyes, of instinctive and expressive movements; and we have also laid stress upon the manifold part played in the mental life by kinÆsthesis, by sensations from the moving organs. So we are prepared to consider movement in its own psychological right, as correlated with special mental processes or patterns.

There are, as usual, a few preliminary matters to be got out of the way. First of all, we shall do well to distinguish the terms ‘movement’ and ‘action.’ Movement is, without question, the wider term. Action, although it is very loosely used in ordinary speech, so that we speak of the action of a horse or a sewing-machine, is the word that we naturally employ in referring to human conduct. We may therefore take advantage of this difference in meaning, and may say that action, as a technical term in psychology, denotes any organic movement that has mental correlates; or more strictly, that it is an organic movement any phase of which, beginning, middle or end, has mental correlates. The need of the stricter definition will appear as we go on.

Secondly, we must be clear as regards the problem which action, as thus defined, presents to psychology. We have, of course, to describe and to correlate; to describe the mental processes that occur with movement, or with one or more of its phases; and to indicate, as well as our knowledge permits, the corresponding processes in the nervous system. We have made out three modes of correlation: separate mental processes correspond with certain brain-processes; the pattern of mental connection corresponds with the play of associative tendencies in the brain; and the course of the mental stream corresponds with the activity of determining tendencies. These, then, are the limits within which we work; and we shall be obliged to leave the subject very much in the rough; for psychological description is still imperfect, and our knowledge of the nervous mechanisms is woefully incomplete. Be clear, nevertheless, that the psychological problem lies within these limits. The psychologist has nothing to do with the relative values of ‘motives.’ He cannot teach you how to acquire ‘control’ of your actions. His task is simply to set forth the facts; and if the facts that he discovers are of value for morals or education, as indeed they can hardly fail to be, so much the better; only, you must not confuse scientific information with practical advice, and be disappointed at the one because you do not receive the other. All this has been said before; but the present is a good time for repeating it.

Lastly, you should realise that in an organism so complicated as man, and of such varied and eventful history, movement by itself is no index to mental process. There are, no doubt, outward and visible signs of hesitation, of deliberation, of quick resolve; but the bare movement is not a cue to mind. Psychological enquiry must always go behind the movement; that is, we must either know the previous mental history of the individual who makes the movement, or we must ourselves arrange the circumstances under which the movement is to be made. Suppose, for instance, that you have to sign your name to a deed. You may have spent weeks in reflection, in balancing pros and cons, in painful indecision; your action is then a ‘voluntary action’ of the most positive sort; and yet, when the moment comes, your signature flows smoothly from the pen, as if the matter had never cost you a moment’s worry. Now suppose that you are sitting in a committee-meeting, listening to a tedious report; you take the blank paper before you, and write your accustomed signature, without either the intention to write or knowledge that you are writing. The two movements may be indistinguishable, and yet this second writing is an ‘automatic’ or ‘involuntary’ action. So a hand-shake may mean the barest recognition of a casual acquaintance, or the friendly settlement of a long-standing disagreement; the onlooker can see no difference in the movements, though their mental accompaniments are worlds apart. There is, indeed, no chapter in psychology that illustrates the law of mental growth and decay (p. 183) so fully and so surprisingly as this chapter on action. Movements that once were rich in mental correlates fall into the direst psychological poverty; and movements that now are poor may acquire a mental fortune, which they in their turn are bound presently to lose.

§ 54. The Typical Action.—Under these circumstances, it sounds a little incongruous to talk of a ‘typical’ action. But we must start somewhere; and we may, perhaps, say that the typical action, for psychology, is an action of the simplest form taken at its psychological best; in other words, an organic movement that is singly determined and that shows a maximum of mental accompaniment. You will understand better what this definition means when we have worked out an illustration. Meantime, you can see that such an action—we call it an impulsive action—serves as point of departure in two directions. The form may remain simple, while the mental side suffers reduction; or the form may become complicated, and therewith new mental characters may be introduced. In the former case, the impulsive action runs downhill toward automatic; in the latter, it climbs up toward deliberative action.

Now for the illustration! Suppose that, as I am writing this paragraph, it occurs to me to look up a reference, for quotation, in a particular book that stands on the shelf by my side. I turn toward the shelf, recognise the book, take it in my hand and turn the pages, and presently find the passage I had in mind to use. I have performed an impulsive action, in the sense of our definition; the illustration is complete. I shall go on to put a marker in the book, or to copy out the sentence, and ultimately I shall return the book to the shelf; but these later developments do not here concern us.

Let us try to analyse this action; and since the mental accompaniment is fairly complex, let us analyse, at first, only in large and gross terms. We begin with a preparatory phase, in which there are two things to notice: the intention to move (it occurs to me to look up the reference) and the idea of the result of movement (finding the required passage for quotation). Then follows a middle phase, in which the outstanding thing is the perception of the object of movement (I see and identify the book on the shelf). The final phase includes a perception of movement itself in kinÆsthetic terms (I reach out, take the book down, turn the pages) and also the perception of the result of movement (I find the sentence). So we have three roughly distinguishable phases, each one issuing from that which preceded it, which we may formulate as follows:

You understand that the arrows indicate a definite direction; the second and third phases issue from the first; the whole course is predetermined. When I perceive the book, under this impulsive determination, the associative tendencies have no freedom of play; I cannot think that the back is breaking, or that I know the writer, or that the chalky paper is detestable, though all of these are things that might occur to me at another time; I can only recognise the book as the book that will realise my idea of result, that contains the passage I need. The whole course, again, is singly, unequivocally, predetermined; it occurs to me to use the quotation, and I do not reflect or hesitate; I act directly and forthright upon the suggestion; there is no conflict. In a word, the example shows us action in its simplest form and with a maximum of mental concomitant; and that is what we agreed to regard, from the psychological point of view, as a typical action.

Analysis of this crude kind does no more than give us our bearings. If we are to lay out the facts with scientific accuracy, we must carry actions into the laboratory, and examine them under experimental conditions. We do this by way of the ‘reaction experiment.’

§ 55. The Reaction Experiment.—The reaction experiment comes to us, of all unlikely things, by the road of astronomy. In the old days, before electrical instruments were invented, astronomers used to time the passage of a star across the meridian of their observatory by means of the eye-and-ear method. You can easily imagine the procedure. You have your eye at the ocular of a telescope, the field of which is evenly divided by a number of fine vertical lines. The star enters the field from the right, and crosses to the left; your task is to determine the instant at which it traverses the midmost vertical line, which corresponds with the meridian. A clock is behind you, beating seconds; and you count these seconds, one, two, three, from a given starting-point. If the star passes the meridian exactly on a beat, well and good; you know the time of its passage; if, as ordinarily happens, it passes somewhere between two beats, then you must estimate the time of passage to the nearest tenth of a second. That is the principle of the eye-and-ear method; you watch and listen, and so make your observation.

In the year 1796, the astronomer in charge of the Greenwich Observatory found himself obliged to dismiss an otherwise competent assistant, who in the previous year had fallen into the habit of recording his transits some half-second too late, and had now increased his error to almost a whole second. This unfortunate man was the originator of what came to be known as the personal difference. For it was found that no two astronomers exactly agreed in their recording of times; every observer differed from every other by a certain average amount. So it became customary to take some highly skilled observer as standard, and to refer other observers to him; and that is the origin of the personal equation; the formula A-B = 0.8 sec. means, for instance, that the observer A records a transit, on the average, four-fifths of a second later than the more skilled observer B. What B’s error may have been nobody knows.

We cannot trace the history of the personal difference in detail. It is enough to say that the astronomers, having discovered it, were naturally anxious to get rid of it; and they presently found a way to relieve the observer of the task of listening; he simply pressed a key when the star crossed the line of the meridian, and the time of pressing was recorded automatically. This device did not eliminate the personal difference; but it was methodically of great importance. For the eye-and-ear method had now become, essentially, a method of response to stimulus by movement; and in that form it settled down permanently in the psychological laboratory. The stimulus for the astronomer was the star on the meridian, and the response was the pressure of his finger on a key. But it is clear that the stimulus need not be visual; the observer might just as well respond to a sound or a touch or a taste. It is clear, further, that the response need not be a movement of the hand; the observer may respond, just as well, by movement of the organs of speech, or of the foot, or of lip or eyelid. It is clear, finally, that if we know the actual time at which the stimulus is presented, and the actual time at which the movement of response takes place, we can measure the interval between the two. A little ingenuity makes this possible. If, for instance, the flash of light which serves as stimulus makes an electrical circuit, and the finger-movement in response breaks the circuit; and if an electrical clock is placed in the same circuit; then the clock-hands will begin to move when the flash comes, and will stop when the movement occurs, and we can read off the reaction time from the dial.

In its simplest form, then, the reaction experiment takes shape as follows. We subject the observer to some prearranged form of stimulation (a flash of light, a sharp noise), to which he is to reply by some prearranged movement (perhaps, the slipping of his finger from the button of a telegraph key); and the instruments which we employ are so connected that we can measure the time elapsing between the exhibition of stimulus and the performance of answering movement. The experiment thus has two sides. It gives us numerical results, the reaction times measured in units of our clock, in hundredths or thousandths of a second; but it gives us also a complete impulsive action, which we can observe as often as is necessary for analysis.

For consider the course of the reaction experiment in the light of our typical formula of action! The observer sits down with the intention of moving when he has perceived the stimulus; and he has an idea of the result of his movement, namely, the performance of a reaction experiment. The stimulus is presented; he perceives the object of movement; and slips his finger from the key. He thus perceives the movement itself, and also, by the movement, realises in perception his idea of result. He has performed a complete impulsive action, but an action which, on the mental side, has been thinned out to a manageable degree of simplicity. The mental accompaniment is there; but the intention to move bears upon a single finger, the idea of result is just the idea of completing the experiment, the perception of object is the perception of a simple stimulus, the movement itself is a slight local displacement of a single member; nothing is left out, although the action is reduced to a skeleton. It has thus been made manageable; the mental accompaniments of the movement are not so complex that they baffle observation; and the technique of the experiment is an outline which can be filled in and further complicated in all manner of ways. We may hope that that Greenwich assistant found further employment; but we can hardly, as psychologists, regret that he timed his transits later than he should!

§ 56. Sensory and Motor Reaction. —Suppose that you are performing the simple reaction experiment, and that you tell your observers beforehand to react as soon as they perceive the stimulus. You soon find that this instruction is differently interpreted. One observer will prepare to react as soon as he perceives the stimulus; and another, to react as soon as he perceives the stimulus. The difference of emphasis may be brought out by a homely illustration. When the lights are turned on in the evening, it is not uncommon, even in the best regulated families, for a clothes-moth to start up from some corner. You say ‘There’s a moth!’ and clap your hands to kill it. But it escapes; and henceforth you do not trouble to identify it; you clap your hands at anything mothlike that flits across the field of vision; you are set or disposed for the movement. So in the two forms of the simple reaction: some observers tend naturally to make sure of the stimulus, before they move, and others tend naturally to move, as soon as any stimulus has appeared.

We cannot rely, however, upon the natural tendency of the observer, because his attitude is likely to change as the experiment proceeds, and a change of attitude means a disturbance of the experimental conditions. Moreover, there are observers of intermediate tendency, who accent both the ‘perception of stimulus’ and the ‘reaction as soon as,’ and may accent them in different degree. Hence it is necessary to instruct the observers at the outset that they are to perform either a sensory or a motor reaction, that is, that they are to look forward either to the perception of the stimulus or to the execution of the movement. With this preliminary instruction, the sensory reaction takes, on the average and for practised reactors, a tenth of a second longer than the motor, whether the stimulus be a sight, a sound, or a touch. The longer time points, of course, to a more complicated nervous path; and that in turn raises the presumption of a richer mental accompaniment. Observations show, in fact, that only the sensory reaction represents a complete impulsive action; the motor reaction does not fall under our formula.

The main difference—and we have no space for detailed analysis—is this. The instruction for the motor reaction sets up kinÆsthetic sensations of strain in the reacting member, principally in the finger; these are contextual processes (p. 118), which carry the meaning ‘You are to react as quickly as possible’; and they are accordingly known as ‘sensations of intended movement.’ They imply that the instruction is already in part fulfilled; the muscles are, from the very first, prepared for the movement that shall end the experiment. Indeed, an observer who is thus instructed will sometimes react prematurely, before the stimulus has appeared, and is also liable to accept as the stimulus any chance stimulus that intervenes, and so to react wrongly. The instruction for the sensory reaction, on the other hand, sets up an expectation of the stimulus; the organism is thus prepared especially for perception; premature and wrong reactions do not occur. The intention to move is present, to be sure, but it is in the background, carried only by the feel of the finger as it lies upon the key, or in more diffuse form by the feel of the extended arm upon the table. We might therefore say that, in the motor reaction, the formula tends to close up on itself, like a telescope; idea of result is always approaching perception of result, and intention of movement is always approaching perception of movement; the perception of object gets squeezed between the two extremes, as these draw together; whereas, in the sensory reaction, the formula is followed in extenso; the mental processes are thinned out, as we have put it, but they are all present, following one another in their regular order. The reaction experiment thus renders the impulsive action manageable, puts it at our disposal for scientific analysis, but also shows that an action, even in its simplest form, will vary with every shift of emphasis in the suggestion (p. 213) which calls it forth.

Let us look, now, at the reaction times, and see if they can be turned to scientific account. So many experiments have been made that we know the average times of reaction, both sensory and motor, to light, sound and touch; and we also know what their average constancy or regularity will be, if the reactor keeps his attitude to the experiments unchanged. The times themselves, and the numerical statement of their constancy, may therefore be used as indexes to the type of reaction, sensory or motor, and to the stability or instability of the reactor’s attitude. They embody, as if in short-hand, the results of oft-repeated observation, and they may henceforth take the place of direct psychological observation when we are asked to decide on the type of reaction or the reliability of the reactor. The psychological observation must, however, come first; we cannot take the reaction-times of children or South Sea Islanders, and at once put them down as sensory or motor or mixed; we must know what the reactors were trying to do, how they understood the instructions given them.

§ 57. The Degeneration of Action: From Impulsive to Reflex.—We have now to trace the course of impulsive action, downward to automatic, and upward to deliberative action. If we start out on the downward path, we note that impulsive action by frequent repetition degenerates, first, to what is called sensorimotor or ideomotor action: sensorimotor, if the object is still perceived, as it is in the impulsive action proper (p. 235), and ideomotor, if the perception is replaced by an idea of object. Here the predetermination is a nervous set without any mental correlates; the intention to move has dropped away; and the idea of result is, so to say, incorporated in the perception or idea of object; so that movement follows at once upon this perception or idea. When we sit down at table, for instance, we take up our knife as a thing to cut food with; and when we are dressing, we close our fingers round a button as a thing to fasten a garment with; the movements that we make are predetermined, but not premeditated; the actions are sensorimotor. When, again, it occurs to us, in the midst of our reading, that the mail must have arrived, we ideate the packet of letters as something to be fetched from the mail-box; and when, as we watch the shower, it occurs to us that the cellar hatchway is open, we ideate the hatchway as something to be closed; we act without further thought, and the actions are ideomotor.

But the degeneration may go further still. “There is a story,” writes Huxley, “which is credible enough, though it may not be true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out ‘Attention!’ whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and potatoes in the gutter.” Huxley calls this an artificial reflex action; and indeed the organism responds, in such cases of thorough drill, as fatally and automatically as in the physiological reflexes, and with as little apprehension of the nature of the stimulus; there is nothing to choose, psychologically, between this direct response to the word ‘Attention!’ and the blinking of the eye in response to a threatened blow, or the snatching back of the hand from a hot surface, or the withdrawal of the foot when the sole is tickled. From the psychological point of view, impulsive action, instinctive action and artificial reflex all shade off into one another; and the artificial and physiological reflexes are indistinguishable.

Only, as we know, the artificial reflex has a mental history; the word ‘Attention!’ had been called out many thousand times before it became a compelling suggestion. What, then, of the physiological reflex? Has it, too, a mental history, extending beyond the individual to the race; is it a racially degenerate impulsive action? or does it belong to a class apart, purely physiological in character, and without right to mention in a text-book of psychology?

The answer to these questions must be speculative; and speculation, as is almost always the case, has swung between opposed extremes. Some psychologists teach that all action has its origin in the physiological reflex; the organism at first moved reflexly, automatically, fatally; and then, later, mental processes were somehow ‘imported’ into its activities. Others hold that all organic movements were originally of the impulsive sort; the physiological reflex, so far from being primary, is a late development, the final term in a series which begins with movement of a large, diffuse sort, accompanied by mental processes, and which ends with precise, local movement devoid of mental correlates. Both these views are open to objection from the biological side; and it seems reasonable to suppose that the earliest movements of the earliest organisms were of two kinds: some were bare reflexes, or—to use the newer word—physiological ‘tropisms’; others, however scanty and undifferentiated their mental accompaniment, were still of the nature of impulsive actions. If this mediating view be adopted, as a working hypothesis, the zoologist and the comparative psychologist must join forces, to trace the racial history of the physiological reflexes, and to determine what part of our human equipment is ultimately tropistic, and what part may be referred back to earlier impulses.

The passage from an impulsive action to an artificial reflex may be regarded, broadly, as an example of the effect of practice. We have seen that improvement in such activity as piano-playing depends, not solely upon repetition, but largely also upon changes in our method of working; upon the sudden discovery of some new trick of procedure, or the sudden release from some hampering peculiarity of method (p. 170). Turning-points of this same sort are characteristic of the path from impulse to reflex; we do not find a gradual refining of movement and a corresponding simplification of its mental accompaniments; the history is rather a matter of short-cuts and substitutions; the organic machine is too complicated, too sensitive, has too great a variety of resources, to follow a beaten track. So the course of impulsive action, though it be downhill, cannot be expected to run smooth.

§ 58. The Development of Action: From Impulsive to Selective and Volitional.—Action appears in its simplest form when it is singly or unequivocally determined (p. 235); and this implies that actions of more complicated form are multiply or equivocally determined. What that means you will see at once if you recall the development of attention. Primary passes into secondary attention because we have many sense-organs, all of them open to manifold stimulation at the same time, and because we have many different lines of interest, several of which may be appealed to by the situation in which we chance to find ourselves; there are rival claimants for the centre of the field of attention. Impulsive passes into selective action, in precisely the same way, when the nervous system is the seat of a conflict of impulsive tendencies.

The passage, however, is not made at one step; the conflict of impulses may remain a mere conflict of impulses, without rising to the pitch of selective action. We have already had an instance: the young child, face to face with a strange dog, behaves as if pulled back and forth by strings; it goes toward the dog, runs back to its father, approaches the dog again, shrinks back again, and so on. It has happened to the author, in presence of the two impulses to shut a door on the right and to seat himself at a desk on the left, to begin the right-hand movement towards the door, and then all at once to slue around to the desk without having closed it. In such cases, the organism acts impulsively or instinctively, but acts nevertheless under a dual determination; the instincts or impulses are in conflict. Buridan’s ass, starving to death between its two bundles of hay, illustrates the logical outcome of an exact equality of the conflicting tendencies.

One may observe this sort of action, typically shown, in the behaviour of those who are asked to guess a riddle or solve a mechanical puzzle. Some people, of course, set to work deliberately, and think the matter out in all its bearings; they are not here in question. A great many will behave in the manner just described; they will hazard guess after guess in quick succession, and they will snatch at one possibility of solution after another, risking everything upon the impulse that happens to be dominant at the moment, until they either light upon the right principle or ‘give up.’ Professor Lloyd Morgan, one of the best-known writers upon comparative psychology, thinks that this method of ‘trial and error’ is characteristic of animal intelligence. The dog, for instance, placed in novel circumstances, meets the situation at once by some action that derives from his individual experience or from racial inheritance; if that first response fails, he ‘tries’ another action, similarly derived; and so on, until luck favours him or he is diverted to something else. Only man advances beyond the stage of ‘trial and error’ to the level of rational selection; and man himself need not; in the story of Dite Deuchars Sir J. M. Barrie draws an accurate picture of human conduct permanently arrested between impulsive and selective action.

Selective action appears when the rival impulses are so evenly matched that no one of them can find direct issue in movement; it implies the state of secondary attention; and it is possible only to organisms that possess free ideas of memory and imagination,—probably, that is, only to man. Any biography that goes at all minutely into details will furnish examples. Thus, when the first Napoleon was at liberty to turn his thoughts to England, after the treaty of SchÖnbrunn (1809), he found two possibilities of action: he might himself take in hand the conduct of the war in Spain, or he might devote himself to heightening the rigour of the blockade in the north and north-west. He ‘chose’ the latter course; that is to say, he passed through a period of doubt and hesitation, weighing the alternatives and estimating results,—we know the pattern of secondary attention,—until presently the stronger impulse won. It is always the strongest impulse that wins; though here, as also in the case of attention, it is not necessarily the impulse that looks the strongest to psychological observation; there may be a more impressive array of ideas on the side that finally gives way. The winning impulse, as we see in historical examples of selective action, is that which has the strongest backing of nerve-forces (p. 96). The actor, oftentimes, cannot make his action plausible, even to himself, when he tries to state his ‘reasons’; but the sympathetic historian can trace the influence of tendencies which had no mental correlates, and whose existence was therefore unsuspected by their possessor.

All this is clear in principle, though psychology stands sorely in need of detailed analyses. Let us add a final word of caution,—that you beware of confusing the practical or moral value of selective action with its psychological status. Napoleon the Great was an incomparably more efficient person than Dite Deuchars, and the results of his action were incomparably wider; but with a trifle more balance in the impulsive tendencies, and a little freer play of ideas, the latter gentleman could have performed selective actions of the same psychological type as Napoleon’s.

There is, however, another kind of action—we may call it volitional action—in which an impulse seems to come into conflict, not with another impulse, but with some idea or group of ideas that has no motor reference. I hear my alarum-clock, and have the impulse to get up; but that impulse is definitely opposed by the idea of another half-hour’s sleep. How can an idea oppose an impulse? When CÆsar crossed the Rubicon his alternative was not another course of action, but the passive resignation of the two Gauls and the disbanding of his army; the choice lay between acting and refraining from action. How can activity and passivity thus come into conflict?

The answer to these questions is given with what we said about the nervous correlates of attention (p. 109). We learned, you remember, that nervous reinforcement and nervous inhibition go hand in hand: neither acts without the other; but we were not able at that time to present the evidence for this belief. The evidence is twofold. We find, in experiments upon abstraction, that reinforcement always implies inhibition. Suppose, for instance, that the observer is shown a series of coloured figures, each one for a fraction of a second only, and that he is asked to report accurately upon the form of these visual stimuli. He can do so: but if he is then asked to report further about the colour, he can say little if anything in reply. Reinforcement of the form has brought with it inhibition of the colour. We find, again, in experiments with what is called negative instruction that inhibition always implies reinforcement. Suppose that a picture is shown, and that the observer is told to utter the first word that occurs to him when he sees it, only that the word uttered is not to be the name of the object pictured. He can do this, too; but the results prove that the ‘negative’ always brings in a ‘positive’; either the throat is held stiff, locked up for the time against any utterance whatever, or the instruction ‘Don’t name the object’ is translated by the observer into ‘Name a property of the object’ or ‘Name a use to which the object might be put’; inhibition of the name has meant reinforcement of throat-kinÆsthesis or of some positively suggestive idea.

Apply this evidence, now, to the case in point! The sound of the alarum-clock is, on the face of it, a positive suggestion, bidding me get up; but every suggestion is really two-faced; if it sets off certain of the tendencies natural to the situation, it also checks others. The sound of the bell, therefore, not only reinforces the getting-up tendencies, but also represses the nervous disposition that tends to keep me lying still. In the same way, the idea of further sleep means not only the reinforcement of this disposition to lie still, but also, on the negative side, a blocking of the suggestion from the alarum-clock. The situation offers the alternatives ‘action’ and ‘no action’; but the nerve-forces which the situation calls into play, and which correspond with these alternatives, both alike bear upon ‘action,’ as both alike bear upon ‘no action.’ The conflict is thus, after all, of the same kind as in selective action. Idea does not oppose impulse, nor does activity oppose passivity; but nerve-forces which make for action and against rest oppose nerve-forces which make for rest and against action; the double-faced nature of the nervous mechanism is the key to the riddle. The particular ‘action’ and the particular mode of ‘no action’ are, naturally, determined by the situation itself.

If these selective and volitional actions are often repeated, choice is likely to give way to habit; some one impulse gains predominance over the rest; and then, as if to pay the price of victory, speedily falls to the sensorimotor or ideomotor form, and finally lapses into an artificial reflex. When we are learning to play a musical instrument, our actions are one and all selective; we have to think which dot upon the staff stands for which note upon the keys, and which finger is to be set down where. When we have become adepts, the bare sight of the printed score touches off the appropriate movements; we play ‘instinctively’ in the right key, in the right tempo, with the right emphasis; we may even carry on a conversation, and still play correctly, though we have never seen the score before. The practised speaker does not ‘choose’ his words; his ideas express themselves for him; he may even run ahead in thought, while his larynx is still busy with the present topic. The road to automatism is that with which we are already familiar (p. 245), though the psychological history of the automatic actions is different.

§ 59. The Compound Reaction.—The detailed analyses that we felt the need of on p. 249 ought, by rights, to be provided by the reaction experiment; for that, as we said on p. 239, furnishes an outline-plan of experimental work which can be filled in and complicated in all manner of ways. Why, then, should not selective and volitional action be as manageable as impulsive? and why should we not follow, experimentally, the rise of impulse to choice and its later return to impulse?

There are two main reasons, the one internal and the other external, why the reaction experiment has not developed along the lines of our psychological classification of action. The internal reason is that the reactor is extremely sensitive to slight changes in instruction, in the rules laid down for the experiment. We have already had an instance: the sensory reaction is a skeleton impulsive action; but the motor reaction, which results from a shift of emphasis in the instruction, is not sensorimotor; it is an abbreviated or telescoped impulsive action. Psychologists have naturally been interested in this side of the experiment, and so have tried the effect of varying instructions, instead of duplicating in the laboratory the gross types of action that our classification distinguishes. The second, external reason is that the reaction, largely on account of its outside origin, was for some time treated in a chapter apart; not until the nineties of the last century did psychologists realise that it gave them experimental control of action; and so the technique has been complicated and the outline filled in without special reference to the psychology of action. We need not here go into details; it is enough to say that experimenters have tried the effect of increasing the number of stimuli, and thus of leaving the reactor more or less uncertain of what he shall expect; of increasing the number of possible responsive movements; and of varying the instruction given beforehand to the reactor, in such wise that a particular responsive movement is assigned to a particular stimulus, or that response is made to certain stimuli but not to certain others. All these forms of compound reaction have an interest of their own, which makes their analysis desirable; they enable us to trace the establishment and course of determining tendencies, the tendencies set up by the instructions; and some of them throw light upon the psychology of negative instruction (p. 250). Only, as we have said, they do not represent the different types of action. Things are now changing; but a great deal of work must be done before we obtain typical analyses of the actions discussed in the preceding paragraphs.

In one respect, this historical severance of the reaction experiment from the special psychology of action has been of scientific advantage; it has left experimenters free to employ the reaction method in any connection in which it promised to be of service. The technique of the reaction experiment has, in fact, proved useful in many investigations, in which the psychology of action is not involved. Thus, we may measure the time required for response at different levels of attention, the time required (under various circumstances) for recognition, the time required for the discrimination of sensations whose stimuli are more or less alike, and so on. There are a great many experiments into which this feature of time-measurement may be introduced; and when they have been often repeated, and standard times have been determined, the times themselves and the numerical statement of their constancy become psychologically significant (p. 242); they indicate, in a sort of short-hand way, what the observer has done and how uniformly he has done it. One of the most valuable extensions of the reaction experiment, from the practical point of view, is the association reaction; words are shown or called out to the observer, who replies in every case by the first word that comes into his mind. This experiment may be performed with abnormal as well as with normal reactors, and the results are of importance to the alienist. It has also been employed with a view to the detection of crime: a series of words, some of which bear upon the circumstances of the crime, is presented to the supposedly guilty person, and the time of his response to the critical words is taken as an indication of his guilt or innocence. Under laboratory conditions, with ‘crimes’ invented for the sake of the experiment, some rather surprising results have been obtained; but there have also been flat failures; and no one can yet say positively whether the association reaction will have its place in the legal procedure of the future.

All these word-reactions move in the realm of meanings, which are the practically important things; there is no reason, however, why experiments of the kind described on p. 161 should not be accompanied by time-measurements. We have already suggested that moods might be timed (p. 227); and it is possible to measure the time required for the arousal of a sense-feeling, as well as to note its duration. On the whole, therefore, the reaction experiment or, as we may now term it, the reaction method should play an even larger part in the experimental psychology of the future than it has played in the past.

§ 60. Will, Wish and Desire.—The compound reactions have led us into a digression. But, if the traditional forms—the discriminative, cognitive and choice reactions—are off the main track of the psychology of action, they still throw light on the establishment of determining tendencies to action, and in so far contribute to the psychology of will. For will, taken in a psychological and not in a moral sense, is simply the general name for the sum total of tendencies, inherited and acquired, that determine our actions; and we distinguish different types of will, according as these tendencies to action manifest themselves, characteristically, in different ways. The man of strong will is one whose tendencies are so deep-seated and persistent that he attains his end, or at any rate continues to strive towards it, however remote it may be and however numerous the counter-suggestions that oppose it; and the man of weak will is one whose tendencies are so instable that he is at the mercy of every fresh suggestion that comes. James remarks that, when the will is healthy, action follows, neither too slowly nor too rapidly, as the resultant of all the forces engaged; whereas, when it is unhealthy, action is either explosive or obstructed: the mercurial or dare-devil temperament shows an explosive will, “discharging so promptly into movements that inhibitions get no time to arise”; and the limp characters, the failures, sentimentalists, drunkards, schemers, show the obstructed will, in which “impulsion is insufficient or inhibition in excess,” Divisions of this sort might be pushed much further; but here, as in the parallel case of temperament (p. 227), it is enough to indicate the lines along which classification may proceed.

The terms ‘wish’ and ‘desire’ come to us from popular psychology, and cover a great variety of actual experience. If we are willing to speak somewhat arbitrarily, we may say that a desire appears when some particular tendency to action, which has present control of the nervous system, is thwarted by external circumstances, while the goal of action is still regarded as attainable; and that a wish appears when some tendency to action rises to momentary dominance, but is promptly met by inhibiting tendencies, while the goal of action is regarded as unattainable. This statement of the difference between desire and wish will not fit every case, for the reason that the terms are popular, and not technical, and that their meanings are not sharply distinguished either in ordinary speech or in psychology. The experiences themselves, if we seek to compare them with the experiences discussed in previous chapters, approach most nearly to sense-feelings. Desire is a straining-exciting, and wish a straining-subduing feeling; and both desire and wish may be either pleasurable or unpleasurable, according as the focal idea is the idea of result, of the goal of action, or the idea of its (present or permanent) inaccessibility. The existence of these ideas, however, and the play of associative tendencies which it implies, set desire and wish upon a higher plane of mental development than the sense-feelings; and the fact of direction, of the pressure of determining tendencies, marks another difference between the two kinds of experience.

This reference to sense-feeling reminds us of the doctrine, common to the associationist psychology and to modern popular psychology, that ‘pleasure and pain’ are the sole determinants of action. Bain, for instance, tells us that “the proper stimulus of the will, namely some variety of pleasure or pain,” is always “needed to give the impetus”; “that primary constitution, under which our activity is put in motion by our feelings,” remains unchanged through the whole history of mind. Spencer, as we have seen (p. 86), regards it as a corollary to the general law of organic evolution that “pleasures and pains have necessarily been the incentives to, and deterrents from, actions which the conditions of existence demanded and negatived”; our actions are always ‘guided’ by pleasures and pains, immediate or remote. Leslie Stephen, who is in the main a disciple of Spencer, writes in his brilliant Science of Ethics: “pain and pleasure are the determining causes of action; it may even be said that they are the sole and the ultimate causes.” And, lastly,—though the list of quotations might be greatly extended,—Professor Sully asserts that “the prompting forces in our voluntary action are feelings.”

It is true that there is oftentimes a close relation between feeling and action; we gave some examples on p. 231. It is also true, however, that there are numberless actions into which feeling does not enter. The associationist school have, therefore, fallen into a mistake the opposite of that which we laid at their door on p. 161; as they look at the course of ideas in too intellectual a way, so do they look at action in too emotional a way. They also repeat a mistake which we noted on p. 146. There we found that an idea is supposed to have a ‘power’ to recall another idea; Hume refers to association as “a kind of attraction” which one idea exerts upon another. So here the feelings are supposed to have a ‘power’ to arouse or prevent or deflect actions; they are used to explain conduct, precisely as the laws of association are used to explain the course of ideas. Both these theories betray a misunderstanding of the psychological problem.

We must conclude, then, that the associationists are at fault in their observation; for even if the earliest impulsive actions (p. 244) were invariably preceded by feeling,—and that is a matter of guesswork,—it is still true that our present actions show no such uniformity. We conclude, also, that the explanation of action is to be found in the determining tendencies of the nervous system, and not in the motive force of feeling.

Questions and Exercises

(1) (a) It is said on p. 232 that “the present is a good time for repeating” certain cautions. Now that you have read the chapter, can you see why the statement was made? (b) Criticise, in your own words, the doctrine that pleasure and pain have ‘power’ to determine actions.

(2) Give from your own experience instances (a) of sensorimotor and ideomotor action, and (b) of the passage of selective or volitional action into some simpler form. Make your account as detailed as possible.

(3) Draw up a table, in the form of a genealogical tree, of the various kinds of action discussed in this chapter. Write a psychological formula for every kind. Where does instinctive action come in?

(4) Give instances, from history or fiction, (a) of selective action, (b) of volitional action, and (c) of conflicts from which a volitional action might have resulted, but did not.

(5) Name (a) some of the principal human reflexes, and (b) some of the artificial reflexes most commonly acquired by civilised man.

(6) The following statements occur in various psychological works: (a) every impulse is at the same time emotion; (b) every emotion is at the same time impulse; (c) every emotion is at the same time instinct; (d) every instinct is an impulse. What comment have you to make?

(7) What evidence can you offer for the hypothesis (p. 245) that impulsive actions are, in the history of the race, as old as tropisms?

(8) Suppose that you perform a selective action; the action issues from a conflict of determining tendencies; you ‘decide’ among various possibilities of action. Does the decision always take place in the same way, or can you distinguish ‘types’ of decision?—Do not hurry to answer the question; keep it by you, and answer it in the light of experience.

(9) We saw that the motor reaction (which has its counterpart in everyday life) is a telescoped impulsive action. Can you mention any other kinds of action (also occurring in everyday life) which do not find their precise place under the headings of the chapter?

(10) What kinds of action are involved in the product of constructive imagination?

(11) (a) What is the chief psychological difference between hesitation and deliberation? (b) Give, from your own experience, a detailed analysis of some desire.

(12) It is very important that you should become acquainted with the reaction experiment, and should analyse a number of reactions. Many instrumental outfits are on the market; one of the simplest is President E. C. Sanford’s vernier chronoscope (C. H. Stoelting Co.). When you have familiarised yourself with the experiment, try to plan an experimental study of selective and volitional actions.

References

W. James, Principles of Psychology, ii., 1890, ch. xxvi.; W. Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, 1896, Lects. xviii., xxix.; Outlines of Psychology, 1907, § 14; E. B. Titchener, Text-book of Psychology, 1910, 428 ff.

Special references are: T. H. Huxley, Lessons in Elementary Physiology, Lesson xi. (1896, 302); C. L. Morgan, Animal Behaviour, 1900, 138; A. Bain, The Emotions and the Will: The Will, ch. iii. (1880, 352 and elsewhere); H. Spencer, The Principles of Ethics, i., ch. xiv. (1892, 244 and elsewhere); L. Stephen, The Science of Ethics, 1882, 50; J. Sully, The Human Mind, ii., 1892, 2, 236. The technique of the vernier chronoscope is described by Titchener, Experimental Psychology, I., i., 1901, 117 ff.; ii., 212 ff.