voluntary action, we have in our volitions the peculiar consciousness of choice j the act no longer appears the passive outcome of a conflict of impulses, but an active decision between them. As in volition, so in attention what gives the decision is not the group of ideas actually present, but a latent factor which manifests itself in the consciousness of self. The uniformity and constancy with which this factor functions have led to the inclusion of both processes under the higher concept of apperception. Apperception is simply a name for these processes, not a real entity; it has no existence apart from the changes it produces in the conscious content and from the phenomena of feeling that attend it. And the Ego which is the decisive factor is not an abstract idea, but merely the totality of our native powers and past experiences coming to consciousness as a single feeling.
Exclusive consideration of the conflicting impulses or of the self lead respectively to the vulgar determinism and to indeterminism. The former regards every choice as the necessary issue of the conflict of impulses; but it cannot explain the consciousness of freedom, which depends upon the ascription of an act to the self as the bearer of all permanent volitional tendencies. The latter conceives choice as made by the self independently of motives; but while it explains the consciousness of freedom, it cannot explain either the origin of this consciousness or the influence exerted by the motives upon our acts of will.
Professor Wundt's view of the will, as expressed above, may be briefly summarized in the following sentence: We have, besides presentations and feelings, states of consciousness which we feel to be self-produced; and the self that produces these states is a sort of net-product of our native powers and past experiences. If, to clear up any obscurity that still lingers about the conception of the self, we turn to Professor Wundt's Physiologische Psychologie and Ethik, we read that "the consciousness of self, which has its root in the uniform activity of apperception, at last becomes narrowed down to this alone, so that at the completion of conscious development the will appears as the essential and, taken with the feelings and endeavors that proceed from it, the sole content of self-consciousness, from which the presentations are distinguished as relatively external constituents pointing to a world distinct from the personality";[1] and again, that "in the last stage of development the individual recognizes his essential being in the pure process of apperception; that is, in that inner activity of will which stands opposed to the remaining content of consciousness."[2]
The above explanations have at least the appearance of moving in a
