When a dog is about to rest it often tramps round and round the spot on which it is to recline. Naturalists explain this as the survival of an instinct which in the wild dog served the useful function of guarding it against the presence of harmful creatures hidden in the grass. The domesticated dog is here exhibiting an instinct that belongs to a past condition of life. But man has few instincts—fewer perhaps than any other animal. In their stead he has a greater plasticity of nature, and a more educable intelligence. And it is in the exercise of this educable organization that the psychological medium as expressed in art, literature, and inventions, plays its part for good and ill. So soon as he is able to understand, the individual finds himself surrounded by ideas concerning home, the State, the monarchy, the Church, and a thousand and one other things. He is brought into relation with a vast literature, and also with the play of myriads of minds similar to his own. Henceforth, it is this environment with which he has chiefly to reckon in terms of either harmony or conflict. He can no more escape it than he can dispense with the atmosphere. It is part and parcel of himself. Without it he ceases to be himself; for if we cut away from man all that this psychological heredity gives him he ceases to be man as we understand the term. He becomes a mere animated object.
Finally, we have to note that this psychological environment is cumulative in character as being is all powerful in its influence. By its own unceasing activity humanity is continually triumphing over the difficulties of its material environment and adding to the complexity and power of its mental one. Inevitably the environment thus becomes more psychic in character and more powerful in its operations. We may overcome the difficulties of climate, poor soil, geographical position, etc., but it is impossible to ignore the great and growing pressure of this past mental life of the race. It defies all attempts at material coercion, and gradually transforms a material medium into what is substantially a psychological one. Man cannot escape the domination of his own mental life. Its unfettered exercise supplies the only freedom he is capable of realising, as it constitutes the source of his influence as a link in the causative process of determining his own destiny and moulding that of his successors.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] When the Mss. of this work was submitted to a well-known firm of publishers, the reply came in the form of an offer to publish the work provided it could be expanded so as to admit of its publication at 7/6. It would have been quite easy to have done this; the difficulty is to compress, and the less a subject is understood the easier it is to write at length on it. But the offer, though financially tempting, would have defeated the purpose for which the work was written, and so was declined.
[2] "The subjective sense of freedom, sometimes alleged against Determinism, has no bearing on the question whatever. The view that it has a bearing rests upon the belief that causes compel their effects, or that nature enforces obedience to its laws as governments do. These are mere anthropomorphic superstitions, due to assimilation of causes with volitions, and of natural laws with human edicts. We feel that our will is not compelled, but that only means that it is not other than we choose it to be. It is one of the demerits of the traditional theory of causality that it has created an artificial opposition between determinism and the freedom of which we are introspectively conscious." (Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic, p. 206.)
So also Wundt: "Freedom and constraint are reciprocal concepts; they are both necessarily connected with consciousness; outside of consciousness they are both imaginary concepts, which only a mythologising imagination could relate to things." (Human and Animal Psychology, p. 426.)
[3] The essential issue is again confused by the language employed. If all volitional action is action performed with the view to an end, a quite correct and completely adequate word would be "intentional"! If we were to speak of an "intentional" action instead of a voluntary one, the nature of the act would be clear, the factors of experience, memory, consciousness of an end, would be indicated, and the misleading associations of "willing" avoided. It is difficult, however, to introduce a new terminology, and so I must beg the reader, in the interests of clarity, to bear in mind that whenever "voluntary action" is referred to, it is "intentional" action that is connoted by the phrase.
[4] Whether we work backward or forward the result is the same. Strip off from the mind all feelings, desires, all consciousness of ends and means to ends, and what there is left is not a "will" ready to throw the weight of its preference in this or that direction, but a complete blank.
[5] Types of Ethical Theory, vol. ii. p. 41.
[6] See the lecture on "The Dilemma of Determinism" in the volume The Will to Believe, and other Essays. London; 1903.