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mode of affective consciousness or feeling. The will
is attracted by pleasure. The capital error of the
Hedonist school was the doctrine that the will is at-
tracted only by pleasure, that, in the words of Mill,
"to find a thing pleasant and to will it are one and the
same". This is not true. The object of the will is
the good apprehended as such. This is wider than
the pleasant. Moreover, the primary tendency of
appetency or desire is often towards some object or
activity quite distinct from pleasure. Thus in the
exercise of the chase, or intellectual research, or the
performance of acts of benevolence, the primary
object of the will is the accompUshment of a certain
positive result, the capture of the game, the solution
of the problem, the relief of another's pain, or the like.
This may probably awaken pleasant feeling as a con-
sequence. But this pleasure is not the object aimed
at, nay the "Hedonistic paradox", as it is styled. con-
sists in this, that if this consequential pleasure be
made the direct object of pursuit, it will thereby be
destroyed. Thus, an altruistic act done for the sake
of the pleasure it brings to the agent is no longer
altruism or productive of the pleasure of altruism.
Indeed, the objects of many of the passions which most powerfully impel the will, are ordinarily not pleasures, though they may include rcUef from pain. Emotions or feelings associated with certain ideas tend to express themselves in action. They may dominate the field of consciousness to the exclusion of every other idea. Thus, the sight or the thought of extreme suffering may carry with it emotions of pit)' so intense that con.siderat ions of justice and prudence will be brushed aside in the effort to bring rehef. Such action is impulsive. An impulse is essentially the forcible prompting of a single, strongly affective idea. The will is, in this case, as it were, borne down by feeling, and action is simply the "release" of an emotional strain, being scarcely more truly volitional than laughter or weeping. Bain's description of voluntary action as "feeling-prompted movement", therefore, destroys the essential dis- tinction between voluntary and impulsive action. The same criticism applies to Wundt's analysis of the vohtional process. According to him, "impulsive action" is "the .starting-point for the development of all vohtional acts", from which starting-point voli- tional acts, properly so called, emerge as the result of the increasing complication of impulses; when this complication takes the form of a conflict, there ensues a process called .selection or choice, which determines the victory in one direction or another. P>om this it is clear that choice is simply a sort of circuitous impulse. "The difference between a vohmtary activity (i. e. a complex impulse) and a choice activity is a vanishing quantity." Compare with this the dictum of Hobbes: "I conceive that in all deliberations, that is to say, in all alternate succession of contrary appetites, the last is that which we call the Will".
The essential weakness of both the.se accoimts and of many others lies in the attempt to reduce choice or deliberation (the specific activity of will, and a patently rational process) to a merely mechanical or biological ecjuation. Catholic philosophy, on the contrarj', maintains, on the certain evidence of introspection, that choice is not merely a resultant of impulses, but a superadded formative energy, embodying a rational judgment; it is more than an epitome, or summing-up, of preceding phenomena; it is a criticism of them (see Free Will). This aspect the phenomenist psychology of the modern school fails to explain. Though we reject all attempts to identify will with feeling, yet we readily admit the close alliance that exists between these functions. St. Thomas teaches that will acts on the organism only through the medhim of feeling, just as in cogni- tion, the rational faculty acts upon the material of experience. (Sicut in nobis ratio universalis movet, XV.— 40
mediante ratione particulari, ita appetitus intellec-
tivus qui dicitur voluntas, movet in nobis mediante
appetitu sensitivo, unde proximum motivum corporis
in nobis est appetitus sensiti\'us", Summa theol.,
I, Q. XX, ad 1.) Just as the most abstract intellectual
idea has always its "outer clothing" of sense-imagery,
so volition, itself a spiritual act, is always embodied
in a mass of feeling: on such embodiment depends its
motive-value. Thus if we analyze an act of self-
control, we shall find that it consists in the " checking"
or "pohcing" of one tendency by another, and in the
act of selective attention by which an idea or ideal is
made dynamic, becomes an idee-force, and triumphs
over its neglected rivals. Hence control of attention
is the vital point in the education of the will, for will
is simply reason in act, or, as Kant put it, the causahty
of reason, and by acquiring this power of control,
reason itself is strengthened.
Motives are the product of selective attention. But selective attention is itself a voluntary act, requiring a motive, an effective stimulus of some kind. Where is this stimulus to come from in the fir.st instance? If we say it is given by selective attention, the ques- tion recurs. If we say it is the .spontaneous necessary force of an idea, we are landed in determinism, and choice becomes, what we have above denied it to be, merely a slow and circuitous form of impulsive action. The answer to this difficulty would be briefly as follows: (1) Every practical idea is itself a tendency to the act represented; in fact, it is a beginning or rehearsal of the said act, and, if not inhibited by other tendencies or ideas, would in fact pass into execution at once. Attention to such an idea affords reinforcement to its tendency. (2) Such reinforce- ment is given spontaneously to any tendency which is naturally interesting. (3) The law of interest, the uniform principles governing the influence of the feelings upon the will in its earlier stages, these are an enigma which only an exhaustive knowledge of the physiology of the nervous system, of heredity, and possibly of many other as yet unsuspected factors, could enable us to solve. Leibniz applied his doc- trine of petites perceptions to its solution, and certainly imconscious elements, whether inherited or stored up from personal experience, have much to do with our actual volitions, and lie at the very bottom of character and temperament; but as yet there is no science, nor even prospect of a science, of these things. (4) As regards the determinist horn of the dilemma proposed above, the positive truth of human liberty drawn from introspection is too strong to be shaken by any obscurity in the process through which liberty is realized. The facts of consciousness and the postu- lates of morahty are inexphcable on any other than the libertarian h.vpothesis (see Character and Free Will). Freedom is a necessary consequence of the universal capacity of reason. The power of conceiving and critically contemplating different values or ideals j of desirableness, implies that detachment of will in selection (indifferentia activa), in which, essentially, freedom consists.
Education of Will. — As we have said, control of attention is the vital point in the education of will. In the beginning, the child is entirely the creature of impulse. It is completely engrossed for the time by each successive impres,sion. It exhibits plenty of spontaneity and random action, but the direction of these is determined by the hveliest attraction of the moment. As experience extends, rival tendencies and conflicting motives come more and more into play, and the reflective power of the rational faculty begins to waken into existence. The recollection of the results of past experience rises uj) to check present impulses. As reason develops, the faculty of reflec- tive comparison grows in clearness and strength, and instead of there being a mere struggle between two or more motives or impulses, there gradually emerges a
