Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/325

TYPES OF WILL. 309 accomplish our volition. The mental state or psychosis can then at most be a simple volition. But has it even reached this stage of development ? In considering the type of simple volition, we found that an essential element of it was a judgment, in the common type, a categorical judgment that we were going to accomplish a desired end. But it appeared that this judgment only occurred where a sufficient pause intervened between the desire and its execution. Some obstacle delays the outrush of desire, and in the interval we become conscious that we are doing to satisfy our desire. Here also there is an obstacle, and our desire finds itself constrained. But we are already struggling against this obstacle before we recognise that we are doing so. Our impulse to escape from any object we fear is instinctive. A conscious volition may support this impulse, but the impulse precedes it. Now, what we have to inquire is whether an involuntary action does not sometimes occur so suddenly through the fear that we have of doing it, that the only conation that has time to develop for its restraint is just such an instinctive impulse as fear always involves. In learning to bicycle, people sometimes find that the mere terror which seizes them at the thought of running into a passing vehicle is sufficient to bring about the accident. On such occasions, the thought which occurs to their minds, often betrayed by their exclamation, is, "I know I shall run into it ! " If fear left them time for reflexion before the acci- dent, the second judgment, " I shall try not to," might also occur as the revelation of a conscious will antagonistic to the involuntary impulse. But there is no sufficient interval. As soon as the first judgment occurs, the collision takes place. In this strange type common to our experience, but strange to our preconceptions of will we find an involuntary tendency that apes the character of volition in the judgment that we are going to accomplish the object of that tendency, while the voluntary impulse opposed to it never attains to this degree of development, but reaches at most to the idea of not doing the action without culmi- nating in the definite judgment that we are not going to do it. Yet we should describe the collision as involuntary, and we should say that it occurred in spite of our voluntary effort. For, however unsuccessfully, we tried to avoid it ; though our momentary effort was confused and overpowered through fear of the accident. But according to our definition of will, this effort is not volition, because it is instinctive and precedes the idea of escape, and because this idea of escape does not develop into the judgment that we shall try to