Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/533

A CLASSIFICATION OF FEELINGS, U. 5'2l stand out in conspicuous isolation as the only and invariable antecedent to every outward act, and hence will inevitably be regarded as its cause. To this feeling is given the name of Will. (Genus 1.) Those who are accustomed to regard Will as a separate and primitive faculty of the mind will of course dissent from this view of its nature. To some of them the whole system that is here advocated will be so discordant that a defence of a single position would be futile. Those, however, who admit the validity of Mr. Spencer's division of Mind into Feelings and Relations between Feelings ought not to be hard to con- vince. If Will is not what I have stated it to be, what is it '? By hypothesis it must be either a feeling or a relation. If it is a relation, what are its terms '? Until some answer is given to this question, which appears to me impossible, Will has no primd facie claim to be considered a cognition. Whether it is a feeling or no may be reasonably discussed, but I do not think that anyone will contend that it can be a cognition, and if not, then to those who accept Mr. Spencer's psychology there is no other alternative ; it must be a feeling. Once it is admitted that Will is a feeling, and not a primitive division or faculty of Mind, its position among other feelings becomes a legitimate object of search. Whether the position that I have assigned to it is correct or no is not of much importance. What I wish to insist upon is that it is at least possible to assign to Will a definite posi- tion in a systematic arrangement of the Feelings, and thereby to harmonise the discrepancy between Mr. Spencer's funda- mental division of mind and his subsequent classification of feelings. Every mental state, he says, is either a cognition or a feeling. Very well. Will is certainly not a cognition. It must then be a feeling. If it be a feeling, to what position in his classification are we to relegate it '? Is it a presenta- tive feeling '? or a presentative-representative, or a represen- tative, or a re-representative feeling ? Mr. Spencer himself could scarcely give a satisfactory answer. The place I have given it ma} 7 not be the correct one, but it does at least give it some position, and one which appears to me to accord with the fundamental principles of Mr. Spencer's System of Psychology. Still, if Will be a feeling, it must be a very peculiar one. There must be something in its nature highly distinctive from all other feelings to induce so many great authorities to allot to it a position not only apart from the feelings but altogether separate and unique. An explanation of this fact is certainly required, and can, I think, be found in considera-