and ends and consequently ideas. He is therefore a follower of Schopenhauer as corrected by Hartmann. Like these predecessors, and like his younger contemporary Paulsen, in calling will fundamental he includes impulse (Trieb). Accordingly he divides will into two species: on the one hand, simple volition, or impulse, which in his view requires as motive a feeling directed to an end, and therefore an idea, e.g. the impulse of a beast arising from hunger and sight of prey; on the other hand, complex volition issuing in a voluntary act requiring decision (Entscheidung) or conscious adoption of a motive, with or without choice. Like other German voluntarists, he imputes “impulsive will” to the whole organic world. He follows Fechner closely in his answer to Darwin. If he is to be believed, at the bottom of all organic evolution organic impulses becoming habits produce structural changes, which are transmitted by heredity; and as an impulse thus gradually becomes secondarily automatic, the will passes to higher activities, which in their turn become secondarily automatic, and so on. As now he supposes feeling even in “impulsive will” to be directed to an end, he deduces the conclusion that in organic evolution the pursuit of final causes precedes and is the origin of mechanism. But at what a cost! He has endowed all the plants in the world with motives, feelings directed to an end, and ideas, all of which, according to him, are required for impulse! He apparently forgets that mere feelings often produce actions, as when one writhes with pain. But even so, have plants even those lowest impulses from feelings of pain or pleasure? Wundt, however, having gone so far, there stops. It is not necessary for him to follow Schopenhauer, Hartmann and Fechner in endowing the material universe with will or any other mental operation, because his phenomenalism already reduces inorganic nature to mere objects of experiencing subjects. Wundt’s voluntarism takes a new departure, in which, however, he was anticipated by the paradox of Descartes: that will is required to give assent to anything perceived (Principia philosophiae, i. 34). Wundt supposes not only that all organisms have outer will, the will to act, but also that all thinking is inner will the will to think. Now there is a will to think, and Aristotle pointed out that thinking is in our power whenever one pleases, whereas sense depends on an external stimulus (De anima, ii. 5). There is also an impulse to think, e.g. from toothache. But it does not follow that thought is will, or even that there is no thinking without either impulse or will proper. The real source of thinking is evidence. Wundt, however, having supposed that all thinking consists of ideas, next supposes that all thinking is willing. What is the source of this paradox? It is a confusion of impulse with will, and activity with both. He supposes that all agency, and therefore the agency of thinking, is will. In detail, to express this supposed inner will of thinking, he borrows from Leibnitz and Kant the term “apperception,” but in a sense of his own. Leibnitz, by way of distinction from unconscious perception, gave the name “apperception” to consciousness. Kant further insisted that this apperception, “I think,” is an act of spontaneity, distinct from sense, necessary to regarding all my ideas as mine, and to combining them in a synthetic unity of apperception; which act Fichte afterwards developed into an active construction of all knowledge, requiring will directed to the end of duty. Wundt, in consequence, thinking with Kant that apperception is a spontaneous activity, and with Fichte that this activity requires will, and indeed that all activity is will, infers that apperception is inner will. Further, on his own account, he identifies apperception with the process of attention, and regards it as an act necessary to the general formation of compound ideas, to all association of ideas, to all imagination and understanding. According to him, then, attention, even involuntary attention, requires inner will; and all the functions imputed by Hume to association, as well as those imputed to understanding by Kant, require apperception, and therefore inner will. At the same time he does not suppose that they all require the same kind of will. In accordance with his previous division of outer will into impulsive and decisive, he divides the inner will of apperception into passive apperception and active apperception. Apperception in general thus becomes activity of inner will, constituting the process of attention, passive in the form of impulsive will required for association, and active in the form of decisive will required for understanding and judgment. Now, beneath these confusing phrases the point to be regarded is that, in Wundt’s opinion, though we can receive sensations, we cannot think at all beyond sense, without some will. This exaggeration of the real fact of the will to think ignores throughout the position of little man in the great world and at the mercy of things which drive him perforce to sense and from sense to thought. It is a substitution of will for evidence as ground of assent, and a neglect of our consciousness that we often believe against our will (e.g. that we must die), often without even an impulse to believe, often without taking any interest, or when taking interest in something else of no importance. “The Dean is dead (Pray, what is trumps?).” Yet many psychologists accept the universality of this will to believe, and among them James, who says that “it is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up of practical interests.” We should rather say “far too much.” Wundt, however, goes still farther. According to him, that which acts in all organisms, that which acts in all thinking, that which divides unitary experience into subject and object, the source of self-consciousness, the unity of our mental life, “the most proper being of the individual subject is will.” In short, his whole voluntarism means that, while the inorganic world is mere object, all organization is congealed will, and all thinking is apperceptive will. But it must be remembered that these conclusions are arrived at by confusing action, reaction, life, excitability, impulse, and rational desire, all under the one word “will,” as well as by omitting the involuntary action of intelligence under the pressure of evidence. It may well be that impulsive feeling is the beginning of mind; but then the order of mind is feeling, sense, inference, will, which instead of first is last, and implies the others. To proceed, however, with voluntarism, Wundt, as we have seen, makes personality turn on will. He does not accept the universal voluntarism of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, but believes in individual wills, and a gradation of wills, in the organic world. Similarly, he supposes our personal individual will is a collective will containing simpler will-unities, and he thinks that this conclusion is proved by the continuance of actions in animals after parts of the brain have been removed. In a similar way he supposes our wills are included in the collective will of society. He does not, however, think with Schuppe that there is one common consciousness, but only that there is a collective consciousness and a collective will; not perceiving that then the sun—in his view a mere object in the experience of every member of the collection—would be only a collective sun. Lastly, he believes that reason forms the “ideal” of God as world-will, though without proof of existence. On the whole, his voluntarism, though like that of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, is not the same; not Schopenhauer’s, because the ideating will of Wundt’s philosophy is not a universal irrational will; and not Hartmann’s, because, although ideating will, according to Wundt’s phenomenalism, is supposed to extend through the world of organisms, the whole inorganic world remains a mere object of unitary experience.
iii. His third position is his actualistic theory of soul, which he shares with Fichte, Hegel, Fechner and Paulsen. When Fichte had rejected the Kantian soul in itself and developed the Kantian activity of apperception, he considered that soul consists in constructive activity. Fechner added that the soul is the whole unitary spiritual process manifested in the whole unitary bodily process without being a substance. Wundt accepts Fichte’s theory of the actuality, and Fechner’s synechological view, of the soul. Taking substance entirely in the sense of substrate, he argues that there is no evidence of a substantial substrate beneath mental operations; that there is nothing except unitary experience consisting of ideas, feelings, volitions, and their unity of will; and that soul in short is not substantia, but actus. He does not see that this unity is only apparent, for men think not always, and will not always. Nor does he see that a man is conscious not of idea, feeling, will, experience, but of something conceiving, feeling, willing and experiencing, which he gradually learns to call himself, and that he is never conscious of doing all this “minding” without his body. If, then, these mental operations were merely actuality, they would be actuality of a man’s bodily substance. In truth there is no sound answer to Materialism, except that, besides bodily substance, psychical substance is also necessary to explain how man performs mental actualities consciously (see case Physical Realism, ch. v.). Wundt, however, has satisfied himself, like Fechner, that there is no real opposition of body and soul, and concludes, in accordance with his own phenomenalism, that his body is only an object abstracted from his unitary experience, which is all that really is of him.
iv. Hence his fourth point is his psychological theory of parallelism of physical and psychical reduced to identity in unitary experience. Here his philosophy is Fechnerism phenomenalized. He accepts Fechner’s extension of Weber’s law of the external stimuli of sense, while judiciously remarking that “the physiological interpretation is entirely hypothetical.” He accepts psychophysical parallelism in the sense that every psychical process has a physical accompaniment, every physiological function has a psychical meaning, but neither external stimulus nor physiological stimulus is cause of a psychical process, nor vice versa. Precisely like Fechner, he holds that there is a physical causality and energy and there is a psychical causality and energy, parallels which never meet. He uses this psychical causality to carry out his voluntarism into detail, regarding it as an agency of will directed to ends, causing association and understanding, and further acting on a principle which he calls the heterogony of ends; remarking very truly that each particular will is directed to particular ends, but that beyond these ends effects follow as unexpected consequences, and that this heterogony produces social effects which we call custom. But while thus sharply distinguishing the physical and the psychical in appearance, he follows Fechner in identifying them in reality; except that Fechner’s identification is noumenal, Wundt’s phenomenal. Wundt does not allow that we know beyond experience any souls of earth, or any other inorganic being. He does not, therefore, allow that there is a universal series of physical and psychical parallels. According to his phenomenalism, the external stimulus and the physiological stimulus are both parallels
of the same psychical process; the external body, as well as
