Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/182

168 F. H. BEADLEY : to connect the change with the idea, but we may have a contrary tendency to view the change as beginning from the not-self. And this order again may be in general the more familiar way of our experienced world. 1 If then, in any particular case of relief from pain, there is nothing to sug- gest specially that the process has begun from the idea, we naturally fail to experience ourselves as active. And this failure is a consequence which serves to illustrate and to confirm our doctrine. Let us now suppose on the other hand that the facts are altered. Let us suppose that relief from pain comes habitu- ally when the idea of it is present, or when that idea to a certain extent has inwardly prevailed. And let us suppose that the respective increase and decrease of the idea and of the pain are in general related inversely. Under these conditions we should tend, I submit, to view the relief as ensuing from the idea, and in the process, when it happened, we should gain a perception of our agency. The relief in fact really might arise from another unperceived cause, and our perception of agency would in this case contain an illusion the same illusion which on one view makes the essence of all experience of will. But, whether illusory or otherwise, the perception, I contend, would arise from these conditions, in the absence, that is, of other conditions which are hostile. If a suggestion is made to me that relief from pain comes from the idea, if this suggestion is not qualified in my mind by anything alien or foreign, but remains with me as a simple connexion of my ideas, 2 if then in the presence of the pain I have the idea of its relief, and the idea is realised in the actual cessation of the pain under these conditions I shall experience agency and will. The experience may be illusory, we have seen, but that point is irrelevant, or, so far as relevant, it is not an argument against our view. For we are asking merely 1 A change ensuing on, and continuously following from, motion of some object not my body, tends in general to be attributed to that ob- ject and not to myself. On the other hand the origin of motion in my body, as coming from myself and proceeding outwards, is, I presume, the main source of our experience of agency. The perception of agency in my outward world, I should agree, is transferred, but, though trans- ferred, it may have become a more familiar and natural way of appre- hension. I do not however mean by this to imply that our experience of the order of the outward world begins with such a transferred perception of agency. 2 This proviso must be emphasised. If there is anything about the idea which makes it other than my idea simply, the act will so far not be experienced as my will. See the preceding article, No. 44.