Will, or choice, like all phases of mental life, may be looked at either in a particular or a general aspect; and we have, accordingly, individual will or social will, depending upon our point of view, as to whether we regard the activity singly or in a mass. But there is no real separation; they are only different phases of the same thing. Any choice that I can make is a synthesis of suggestions derived in one way or another from the general life; and it also reacts upon that life, so that my will is social as being both effect and cause with reference to it. If I buy a straw hat you may look at my action separately, as my individual choice, or as part of a social demand for straw hats, or as indicating non-conformity to a fashion of wearing some other sort of hats, and so on. There is no mystery about the matter; nothing that need puzzle anyone who is capable of perceiving that a thing may look differently from different standpoints, like the post that was painted a different color on each of its four sides.
It is, I think, a mistake of superficial readers to imagine that psychologists or sociologists are trying to depreciate the will, or that there is any tendency to such depreciation in a sound evolutionary science or philosophy. The trouble with the popular view of will, derived chiefly from tradition, is not that it exaggerates its importance, which would perhaps be impossible; but, first, that it thinks of will only in the individual aspect, and does not grasp the fact—plain enough it would seem—that the act of choice is cause and effect in a general life; and, second, that it commonly overlooks the importance of involuntary forces, or at least makes them separate from and antithetical to choice—as if the captain were expected to work the ship all alone, or in opposition to the crew, instead of using them as subordinate agents. There is little use in arguing abstractly points like these; but if the reader who may be puzzled by them will try to free himself from metaphysical formulæ, and determine to see the facts as they are, he will be in a way to get some healthy understanding of the matter.[[2]]
By way of illustrating these general statements I shall first offer a few remarks concerning suggestion and choice in the life of children, and then go on to discuss their working in adult life and upon the career as a whole.
There appears to be quite a general impression that children are far more subject to control through suggestion or mechanical imitation than grown-up people are; in other words, that their volition is less active. I am not at all sure that this is the case: their choices are, as a rule, less stable and consistent than ours, their minds have less definiteness of organization, so that their actions appear less rational and more externally determined; but on the other hand they have less of the mechanical subjection to habit that goes with a settled character. Choice is a process of growth, of progressive mental organization through selection and assimilation of the materials which life presents, and this process is surely never more vigorous than in childhood and youth. It can hardly be doubted that the choosing and formative vigor of the mind is greater under the age of twenty-five than after: the will of middle age is stronger in the sense that it has more momentum, but it has less acceleration, runs more on habit, and so is less capable of fresh choice.
I am distrustful of that plausible but possibly illusive analogy between the mind of the child and the mind of primitive man, which, in this connection, would suggest a like simplicity and inertness of thought in the two. Our children achieve in a dozen years a mental development much above that of savages, and supposing that they do, in some sense, recapitulate the progress of the race, they certainly cover the ground at a very different rate of speed, which involves a corresponding intensity of mental life. After the first year certainly, if not from birth, they share our social order, and we induct them so rapidly into its complex life that their minds have perhaps as much novelty and diversity to synthetize as ours do.
Certainly one who begins to observe children with a vague notion that their actions, after the first few months, are almost all mechanically imitative, is likely to be surprised. I had this notion, derived, perhaps without much warrant, from a slight acquaintance with writings on child-study current previous to 1893, when my first child was born. He was a boy—I will call him R.—in whom imitativeness, as ordinarily understood, happened to be unusually late in its development. Until he was more than two years and a half old all that I noticed that was obviously imitative, in the sense of a visible or audible repetition of the acts of others, was the utterance of about six words that he learned to say during his second year. It is likely that very close observation, assisted by the clearer notion of what to look for that comes by experience, would have discovered more: but no more was obvious to ordinary expectant attention. The obvious thing was his constant use of experiment and reflection, and the slow and often curious results that he attained in this manner. At two and a half he had learned, for instance, to use a fork quite skilfully. The wish to use it was perhaps an imitative impulse, in a sense, but his methods were original and the outcome of a long course of independent and reflective experiment. His skill was the continuation of a dexterity previously acquired in playing with long pins, which he ran into cushions, the interstices of his carriage, etc. The fork was apparently conceived as an interesting variation upon the hat-pin, and not, primarily, as a means of getting food or doing what others did. In creeping or walking, at which he was very slow, partly on account of a lame foot, he went through a similar series of devious experiments, which apparently had no reference to what he saw others do.
He did not begin to talk—beyond using the few words already mentioned—until over two years and eight months old; having previously refused to interest himself in it, although he understood others as well, apparently, as any child of his age. He preferred to make his wants known by grunts and signs; and instead of delighting in imitation he evidently liked better a kind of activity that was only indirectly connected with the suggestions of others.
I frequently tried to produce imitation, but almost wholly without success. For example, when he was striving to accomplish something with his blocks I would intervene and show him, by example, how, as I thought, it might be done, but these suggestions were invariably, so far as I remember or have recorded, received with indifference or protest. He liked to puzzle it out quietly for himself, and to be shown how to do a thing often seemed to destroy his interest in it. Yet he would profit by observation of others in his own fashion, and I sometimes detected him making use of ideas to which he seemed to pay no attention when they were first presented. In short, he showed that aversion, which minds of a pondering, constructive turn perhaps always show, to anything which suddenly and crudely broke in upon his system of thought. At the same time that he was so backward in the ordinary curriculum of childhood, he showed in other ways, which it is perhaps unnecessary to describe, that comparison and reflection were well developed. This preoccupation with private experiment and reflection, and reluctance to learn from others, were undoubtedly a cause of his slow development, particularly in speech, his natural aptitude for which appeared in a good enunciation and a marked volubility as soon as he really began to talk.
Imitation came all at once: he seemed to perceive quite suddenly that this was a short cut to many things, and took it up, not in a merely mechanical or suggestive way, but consciously, intelligently, as a means to an end. The imitative act, however, was often an end in itself, an interesting exercise of his constructive faculties, pursued at first without much regard to anything beyond. This was the case with the utterance of words, and, later, with spelling, with each of which he became fascinated for its own sake and regardless of its use as a means of communication.
In a second child, M., a girl, I was able to observe the working of a mind of a different sort, and of a much more common type as regards imitation. When two months and seven days old she was observed to make sounds in reply to her mother when coaxed with a certain pitch and inflection of voice. These sounds were clearly imitative, since they were seldom made at other times, but not mechanically so. They were produced with every appearance of mental effort and of delight in its success. Only vocal imitations, of this rudimentary sort, were observed until eight months was nearly reached, when the first manual imitation, striking a button-hook upon the back of a chair, was noticed. This action had been performed experimentally before, and the imitation was merely a repetition suggested by seeing her mother do it, or perhaps by hearing the sound. After this the development of imitative activity proceeded much in the usual way, which has often been described.