The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Fouillée - Existence et développement de la volonté - Part 1
Volition is neither a complexus of sensations nor a special faculty, but psychical force. Every state of consciousness is idea in so far as it involves discrimination (discernment), force in so far as it involves preference. Feeling and reaction are inseparable. Each particular sensation depends on the general sensibility, each particular reaction on the general activity. F. does not mean by idea a kind of psychical atom. There is no simple state of consciousness, every state being the resultant of an immense amount of action and reaction between us and the external world. Nor are the diverse states of consciousness and ideas endowed with a detached force; their action is that of the whole of consciousness, of which they are but the forms and actual manifestations.
There is another proof of the existence of will. Our presentations we refer to the external world; our volitions, however, we attribute to ourselves. On this difference alone the distinction between subject and object can be based. Besides, the character of unity and continuity which we attribute to the ego would be incomprehensible without the continuous action of the will to live. Similarly our affections would remain inexplicable without will. Pleasure and pain are not mere passive additions to consciousness. There is present a tendency to maintain the pleasurable and reject the painful, consequently a spontaneous and inevitable choice or will. Every sensation is a complete psychological process with all its elements. We are everywhere active; will ceases with life alone.
Whoever denies the existence of will must, on considering the matter physiologically, reduce all cerebral facts to simple peripheral impressions. But the absence of a central element can never be proved. Simple cerebration (to which the idea of a possible movement corresponds) is a state of tension in which a totality of little oscillatory movements counteract each other, while the actual triumph of a cerebral impulse implies a nervous discharge in a given direction. According to the resistance which the volition encounters both in execution and production, there is a more or less intense feeling of mental and cerebral effort. The usual distinction between sensorial and motor centres is artificial. Every centre is both. The centre moved, moves in its turn; if there were no other centres in question, the shock given by the centripetal current would produce a centrifugal movement on the same path. Hence every sensation is at the same time impulse, every impulse sensation. Special inhibitory organs are also fictions. Two nervous currents reinforce or neutralize each other.
F. next considers the existence of will from the philosophical point of view. There are not two distinct realms, one of movement and one of thought. For the philosopher the world is but a phenomenon. It is vain to seek a real activity or causality in such a physical world, there being but successions of phenomena in time and space here. The true activity must be ascribed to the reality which dwells beneath the system of visible and tangible appearances. It is will. Will and feeling consciousness are everywhere. Philosophy will come to see in physical energy the external expression of psychical energy, i.e. will, which constitutes reality.