The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Fouillée - Existence et développement de la volonté - Part 2
F. maintains that it is impossible to explain will as the development of a simple mechanical reflex action, without going beyond the hypothesis and supposing a psychical point of departure. If the mechanical reflex theory were true, one would expect to find this type of actions manifested more and more clearly as we descend in the animal scale. A study of lower animals shows, however, that such mechanical acts are almost absent, and that the appetites — hunger, thirst, etc. — determine their movements. Again, although we find that acts at first performed under the influence of sensation and appetite become mechanical by habit, we have not a single example of reflexes becoming voluntary by a progressive evolution. Mechanical determinism is without doubt present in simple appetitive movements, but this does not prevent the movements being at the same time sensitive and appetitive: the line of least resistance is always psychically the line of least pain. F. agrees with Ribot that the mechanical reflexes express less the characteristics of the individual than those of the race; the appetitive process, on the other hand, is an individual reaction directed towards retaining a pleasant state of consciousness or getting rid of a painful state. This primordial volition has no need of conceiving several possible lines of action or of opposing a representation to the present pain or pleasure. The understanding which comes on the scene later to adjust means to ends is only a link in the chain. An object cannot be valued as an end unless it is immediately willed by a spontaneous volition anterior to all reflexion of the understanding. F. classifies the impulsions to volition as Sensations, Perceptions, and Ideas (idées). The purely sensitive impulses suppose a sensation produced by contact with an object, a feeling of pleasure or pain, and finally an immediate appetitive response of seeking or aversion. It is this latter process which we consider fundamental in psychology. The perceptive impulses form the principle of all instincts. In virtue of the power of inhibition which belongs to more complex organisms we are able to be controlled by judgments and ideas, and these become the conscious motives of our actions. The theories as to the nature of the volitional act can be divided into two classes. One explains it as the resultant of external forces upon the character; the other, as a special power, able to change the final resultant of these two factors. The first theory can be subdivided according as one emphasizes the action of the sensitive image or that of ideas and judgments. The essence of the truly voluntary act consists, not in the tendency of an image to realize itself, but in the determination by judgments which pronounces that the realization of such an end depends upon our own causality. It is not the tendency of any idea to its realization, but the tendency of the idea of active personality. Volition is not simply desire which has reached a knowledge of its future satisfaction, but it is mainly distinguished from desire by extension of desire from the end to the means. "To will is to desire with an intensity and clearness which dominates both the end and its means by the idea of freedom." We are able to distinguish three elements in the part which thought plays in volition, — reflexion, deliberation, and decision. The first two elements may be extremely short and hardly occupy any place in consciousness. In deliberation, account is taken not only of sensitive and hedonistic, but also of intellectual, aesthetic, and moral considerations. The decision is a judgment accompanied by an emotion and appetition which acquires sufficient intensity and duration to occupy consciousness almost exclusively, and consequently to produce the correlative movements. The important point is to understand how the judgment influences desire, and through it, action. F.'s answer is that, if the judgment is a practical one, we find the representations and reactions connected by a bond analogous to that which unites the primitive sensations and reactions, with a difference only in complexity: if the judgment be theoretical, the reaction still exists as an internal sketch of certain acts and movements. We may conclude that it is only necessary to conceive of a determinism much more complex, and at the same time much more flexible, than that of the Associationist school which divides the mind into ideas or separate states, in order to combine them like the stones in a mosaic. It is necessary also to take account of the reaction exercised upon determinism by the notion of liberty under its diverse forms, and to seek in a comprehensive determinism the only possible or desirable liberty.