197. In what ways are activities of the kind just mentioned perfected?
198. What is the relation of sensory activity, consciousness, and performance in perfected serial movements?
199. Illustrate by a pathological case the relation just spoken of.
200. What rule is illustrated by the example in the text of pulling a cork from a bottle?
§ [22]. Freedom of Conduct
As experience of the connections, complications, and consequences of things advances, the ideas called up by any impression must clearly become very numerous. Ideas of near and remote, probable and improbable, desirable and undesirable, consequences,—ideas of fit and unfit, direct and indirect means of bringing about or preventing those consequences,—ideas of difficulties and obstacles, facilities and openings must tend to appear, to compete with each other, to disappear and reappear in rapid succession, or merely to approach consciousness ready to appear when their services should be needed. We refer to these various mental states, according as they appear in one or another form of connection, by such terms as reflecting, considering, choosing, desiring, rejecting, intending, deciding, and many others, all having in common the foreseeing of something to be experienced in the future as the result of our action.
What action occurs in each possible case depends on the relative force of the factors coming into play. The actual sensory impression is as a rule a rather insignificant factor. It sets free the ideas derived from innumerable previous sensory impressions. The resulting action is then nearly always extremely different from the instinctive reaction belonging to the sensory stimulation. Such actions, resulting essentially from factors within the mind, not from external factors which happen to impress the mind at the moment, are called free actions. Their freedom does not mean that they have no causation, that they are free of causes, but they are free of the compulsion exerted by the external stimuli of the moment. They are free actions as opposed to instinctive actions, which are not free of these stimuli of the moment, but on the contrary, completely determined by them.
Scholastic philosophy—and popular thought, which is still largely under the influence of that philosophy—recognizes still another kind of freedom of the mind. It assumes that mind, under the impression of perfectly definite external conditions and with perfectly definite internal motives of thought and action, possesses the faculty of deciding in favor of the action opposed to its own motives and of enforcing this action. This faculty of an absolutely causeless willing is assumed to be added to all the other external and internal factors determining action or, as the case may be, suppressing action. Such a faculty we cannot accept, since according to our most fundamental conceptions mind is not a being added to its experiences, but the totality of its experiences, in so far as it knows itself; whereas it is called brain in so far as it is known by other minds. The arguments brought forward in favor of a freedom of the will in the sense of a possibility of causeless action are inacceptable to the psychologist because they would make a psychological science impossible. Nevertheless, it is worth while to discuss the more important ones briefly.
Three arguments are most commonly offered. First, immediate experience tells us that, whenever we decide in favor of one action, we could have decided differently. We were conscious of the possibility of acting otherwise. The second and third arguments are of a practical nature. According to the second, the idea of a uniformly effective causation of our actions paralyzes our activity. If everything takes place by necessity, the idea of influencing the physical world or human society becomes meaningless. No one can believe in determination of our action and at the same time make an effort to instruct and educate people to act differently. Thirdly, no one can be held responsible for his actions if he could not help performing them. If all actions are causally determined, punishment becomes mere cruelty.
The first argument fails because our immediate experience under no conditions informs us exactly as to what caused and what did not cause our actions. We have just seen that a serial movement cannot be carried out unless constant sensory impressions are received from the progress of the partial movements. Immediate experience gives us no information about this necessity, which was entirely unsuspected until physiological experiment and pathological observation revealed the fact. Immediate experience tells a person who in his boarding house praises a very ordinary dinner in exaggerated terms, that he might have kept silent as he usually does—he does not remember that the evening before when he was in a state of hypnosis a suggestion was given to him to praise his dinner the following day. Everybody else knows that he will, that he must, do it. He alone thinks, on the basis of his immediate experience, that it was an act of free will without causation. It was free, uncaused, in the same sense in which the issue of a disease, the outcome of a war, the weather, the crops, are free and uncaused; that is, he was ignorant of the cause.