We have seen that for William James consciousness is “a theatre of simultaneous possibilities” (PP 277), all conjoined and fringed with feelings, tendencies, and associations, ready for the discrimination and comparison of some of those possibilities through the selective activity of the individual mind. (The individual mind is, in fact, a personal self, as we shall discuss in the next chapter.) We have seen, too, that this selective activity is motivated by the individual’s interests, which direct attention to certain aspects of the stream of consciousness and thus away from other aspects. It is attention, thus directed, that draws order out of the “blooming, buzzing confusion” – the con-fused or fused-together whole – of consciousness (462). Meanwhile, the human will – the self- and life-affirming culmination of James’s psychology – is the ultimate expression of the personal agency first manifested in the mind’s basic selectivity. At bottom, James argued, it represents an intentional effort to focus and prolong attention, no more and no less. Thus, attention and will are intimately related in James’s thought. Their return to professional discussions in recent decades, after being banished from “behavioral science” in the half century following James’s death in 1910, has done as much as anything to underscore the continuing relevance of James’s psychology.
It is not surprising that James’s chapter on “Will” (Ch. 26) appears near the end of The Principles of Psychology, constituting in essence the corresponding bookend to his early chapter on “The Functions of the Brain” (Ch. 2). (As noted previously, the two subsequent chapters, after the one on “Will,” are in some ways supplemental to the main body of Principles, the first representing a virtual research agenda for the future and the second and last chapter addressing certain philosophical rather than psychological issues pertaining to human mentality.) While the former bookend established the fundamental role of the human brain in psychological dynamics, the latter one underscored the ultimate agency of the human mind within neurological dynamics. In these two chapters, James accounted for both the relative indeterminism of the human brain and the relative freedom of the human mind, thus answering his own past queries and concerns about the possibility and role of human freedom in an apparently causal world. As we have seen, the human brain in James’s rendition is too complex to be completely stable and hence completely determinate. Its plasticity allows experience, in the form of neurological currents, to amend its structure by creating multiple pathways through its complex circuitry, thus providing the means by which consciousness, through its ideo-motor function, can direct the flow of currents toward this or that action, when neurologically facilitated alternatives exist.
The purpose of this chapter is to make all of this clear. The story begins with the selective activity associated with attention, which creates both a focus and a periphery of consciousness.
James began his chapter on “Attention” (Ch. 11) by observing that “the psychologists of the English empiricist school” had given short shrift to the topic, particularly selective attention, and had thereby overlooked its crucial role in psychological dynamics (380). In effect, he noted, an empiricist like Herbert Spencer “regards the creature as absolutely passive clay, upon which ‘experience’ rains down,” with the clay receiving its deepest impressions “where the drops fall thickest,” and thereby “the final shape of the mind is moulded” (381). In this way, as a result of the mechanical impact of environmental stimuli upon the sense organs, the mind comes to correspond to, or mirror, the outer reality that presses in upon it. Or so Spencer and others had said.
But if this were true, James argued, “a race of dogs bred for generations…in the [sculpture-filled] Vatican” would be as likely as the humans who lived there to become “accomplished connoisseurs of sculpture.” Clearly they do not, for the simple reason that their interest draws them to “the odors at the bases of the pedestals” rather than the statues resting upon them. What the British empiricists ignored was
the glaring fact that subjective interest may, by laying its weighty index-finger on particular items of experience, so accent them as to give to the least frequent associations far more power to shape our thought than the most frequent ones possess. The interest itself, though its genesis is doubtless perfectly natural [e.g., in relation to evolutionary history], makes experience more than it is made by it.
(381)
As James put it in a famous passage,
Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind – without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos [without clear delineation of one thing from another]. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground – intelligible perspective, in a word.
(380–381)
Here is an essential claim of James’s psychology: that the mind is an active agent within its surrounding physical world. Rather than seeing “the higher faculties of the mind” as “pure products of ‘experience,’” with experience conceived as “simply given,” James pointed to evidence that selective attention breaks “the circle of pure receptivity” (380). Although he acknowledged the insight of “the Germans” in this regard, meaning Immanuel Kant and his philosophical and psychological followers, he might also have revealed that he had been personally inspired by the German-influenced British poet William Wordsworth, whose poetry had helped convince him that mental life depends upon subjective as well as objective factors: in other words, that experience is the progeny of both mind and matter (see Leary 2017).
A critical concept for James was the “reactive spontaneity” of mental life (380). Mind is active, but only in response to what is presented to it. Consciousness manifests an array of possible perceptions before the mind responds to the particular aspects that interest it. Similarly, at the level of conceptions, “attention creates no idea; an idea must already be there before we can attend to it” (426). We will see that this was a major premise in his psychological analysis of the human will.
Before we turn to will, however, we need to consider what attention is and how it functions, according to James. “Everybody knows what attention is,” James suggested. “It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” It involves “focalization” or “concentration” of consciousness so that some aspects come into focus while others recede into the shadows of the periphery. This “withdrawal from some things” allows the mind “to deal effectively with others.” The opposite of such attentive concentration is “the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German” (381–382).
Attention may be directed to “objects of sense,” thus constituting “sensorial attention,” or it may be directed to “ideal or represented objects,” constituting “intellectual attention.” And it may be directed immediately, as when “the topic or stimulus is interesting in itself,” or it may be attracted in a way that is derived, as when “it owes its interest to association with some other immediately interesting thing” (373). Finally, it may be either “passive” or “active,” the first being “reflexive” (without conscious intention) and the second being “voluntary” (394). Notably, according to James, voluntary attention, of either the sensorial or intellectual sort, is always derived. It involves making “an effort to attend to an object…for the sake of some remoteinterest which the effort will serve” (394). This fact led him to make the pedagogical recommendation that lessons for children, if the subject matter does not interest them, must be linked to a topic that draws their immediate attention (394, 401, and 422). Indeed, one of the major goals of education, James declared, is to develop “the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again,” since such an ability to attend to objects or tasks that do not serve one’s immediate or reflexive interest not only facilitates learning, but lies at “the very root of judgment, character, and will.” In fact, “no one is compos sui [master of himself] if he have it not” (401).
James was able to point to research on these various modalities of attention, and to clarify such topics as attention span and the interference of one item of attention in relation to another. He also noted how “some persons can voluntarily empty their minds and ‘think of nothing,’” as do subjects of hypnotic trance “when left to themselves” (382). And foreshadowing his later discussion of “The Perception of Reality” (Ch. 21), he noted that “each of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit” (401). By attending to a particular sensation, he pointed out, we can make it “stronger than it otherwise would be,” and by concentrating upon an imagined visual object, we can give it “the brilliancy of reality” (402). Finally, asserting that “its remote effects are too incalculable to be recorded,” James underlined the significance of attention by pointing out its “immediate effects,” namely, that it allows us to perceive, conceive, distinguish, and remember “better than otherwise we could.” It also “shortens ‘reaction-time’” (401). He went on to discuss each of these points, providing a careful review of the experimental evidence for the effects of “expectant attention,” which reduces the time required for perception, and distracted attention, which increases that time (406). (Expectant attention helps to account for the important phenomenon of “preperception,” which we discussed in our chapter on “Perception and Conception” and elsewhere.) James’s entire discussion testified to the ubiquity and importance of the mental selectivity that he had discussed as a prime characteristic of consciousness in his chapter on “The Stream of Thought” (see esp. 273–277).
How can we explain attention? James took a two-pronged approach. On the organic side, he assumed that there must be some kind of “accommodation or adjustment of the sensory organs,” while on the mental side, he pointed to “the anticipatory preparation from within of the ideational centres concerned with the object to which the attention is paid” (411). Observing that “the sense-organs and the bodily muscles which favor their exercise are adjusted most energetically in sensorial attention,” he asserted that “there are good grounds for believing that even intellectual attention, attention to the idea of a sensible object, is also accompanied with some degree of excitement of the sense-organs to which the object appeals” (411). In this latter regard, he reported his own experience of a “backward retraction” associated with “attention to ideas of memory,” a retraction that is “principally constituted by the feeling of an actual rolling outwards and upwards of the eyeballs,” which “is the exact opposite of their behavior when we look at a physical thing” (412). (The reader should reflect on the experience of his or her own physical expression while searching strenuously for some desired memory.) In addition, he said, the process of attention “always partly consists of the creation of an imaginary duplicate of the object in the mind, which shall stand ready to receive the outward impression as if in a matrix” (415). Together, these two processes of sensorial (and muscular) adjustment and ideational preparation, “probably coexist in all our concrete attentive acts” (411). (James went beyond “probably” on 420, where he stated definitively that both processes are involved in “all attentive acts.”)
The upshot is that our actual mental experiences are modified by the two-sided phenomenon of attention, as when we see an ambiguous figure one way or another depending upon our expectation, or when we hear the meaningless French words “pas de lieu Rhône que nous” as “paddle your own canoe” when we anticipate being addressed in English, or when we take a noise in the woods as either a deer or adversary depending upon whether we are hunting or fleeing from pursuers at the time (418–419). (All of these cases are illustrative of preperception, as James pointed out.)
Turning to the metaphysical issue at stake, James then considered whether voluntary attention is “a resultant or a force,” whether it is the effect of some other cause (presumably physical in nature) or whether it is itself a cause of what it seems to bring about (423–430). For immediate sensorial attention, James observed, there seems to be no argument against the “effect-theory” nor any need for the “cause-theory.” Similarly, “derived attention, where there is no voluntary effort, seems also most plausibly to be a mere effect” (425). If something is “interesting enough to arouse and fix the thought of whatever may be connected [i.e., associated] with it,” it is natural to assume that any related arousal of attention is essentially automatic (425). It is only when attention seems voluntary that the question is truly relevant, and even then, James admitted, “it is possible to conceive of it as an effect, and not a cause, a product and not an agent.” “Attention,” after all, “only fixes and retains what the ordinary laws of association bring ‘before the footlights’ of consciousness,” and “the feeling of attending need no more fix and retain the ideas than it need bring them.” If it doesn’t in fact fix and retain them, “voluntary and involuntary attention,” however different they may feel, “may be essentially the same.” This concession led him to reflect that “it is only to the effort to attend, not to the mere attending, that we are seriously tempted to ascribe spontaneous power” (426). He proceeded to note that “effort is felt only where there is a conflict of interests in the mind,” otherwise one’s attention would simply follow the course of no resistance (427). As in other such considerations in Principles, James concluded with a confession that “attention [as an apparently causal action of the mind] may have to go, like many a faculty once deemed essential, like many a verbal phantom, like many an idol of the tribe” (428).
But, then, having “stated the effect-theory as persuasively as I can” and having admitted that “the feeling of effort certainly may be an inert accompaniment and not the active element [in psychological dynamics] which it seems,” James proceeded to ask “just what the effort to attend would effect if it were an original force” (428). “It would deepen and prolong the stay in consciousness of innumerable ideas which else would fade more quickly away,” he said, and even though “the delay thus gained might not be more than a second in duration,” that second “might be critical” in determining “whether one system [of associated ideas and related actions] shall gain force to occupy the field and develop itself, and exclude the other, or be excluded itself by the other.” In allowing one and not the other train of associations to occur, attention “may seal our doom,” which is to say, it may determine a subsequent course of action that is different from the course that might have taken place. And looking forward to his chapter on “Will,” James remarked, in relation to the cause-theory of attention, that
the whole drama of the voluntary life hinges on the amount of attention, slightly more or slightly less, which rival motor ideas may receive. But the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life, depends on our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.
(429)
And then he observed, simply, that “this appearance, which makes life and history tingle with such a tragic zest, may not be an illusion” (429).
Summing up, James admitted that “the advocate of the mechanical theory” may be right, but lacking proof that this is so, “he must grant to us that it may not.” Neither that advocate nor James could honestly claim victory in the matter. “The believers in mechanism” will naturally “incline the beam” toward their own preferred conclusion, he said, but “they ought not to refuse a similar privilege to the believers in a spiritual [i.e., psychological as opposed to purely neurological] force.” James admitted that “I count myself among the latter” – among believers in the cause-theory of attention – yet he granted that “as my reasons are ethical [since he believed that the reality of personal agency is essential to living a responsible and meaningful life] they are hardly suited for introduction into a psychological work” (429). (On James’s ethical struggles with all-encompassing determinism, see Leary 2013.) As a result, “the last word of psychology here is ignorance” (429). But he couldn’t help adding that the mechanists who presume “that consciousness doesn’t count” and that “the presence of feeling and of effort…is not worthy of scientific recognition” should ask themselves why evolution has allowed the development of consciousness and why nature has introduced a “complication” like the feeling of effort (430). What seemed to him the probable answers to these questions further tilted the beam in the direction of the causal theory of attention: that attention is a cause of what it brings about rather than the effect of some other cause.
Attention plays such a crucial role in James’s analysis of will that he himself summarized that role very simply: “Volition is nothing but attention” (424). To understand what he meant by this, we have to consider what willing can and cannot achieve, the nature and production of bodily movement, and how consciousness is involved in it. To start at the beginning, as James did on the first page of his chapter on “Will” (Ch. 26), we need to realize that we can want or wish for many things, but “the only ends which follow immediately upon our willing seem to be movements of our own bodies,” whether those be movements of our head, eyes, heart, arms, legs, or whatever. So, to emphasize the key point, “the only direct outward effects of our will are bodily movements.” No matter what “feelings and havings” we may desire, they come about, if at all, only “as results of preliminary [bodily] movements which we make for the purpose.” For this reason, the study of willing requires a consideration of the nature and production of bodily movement, including especially “voluntary movement” (1098).
This emphasis upon bodily movement at the opening of James’s chapter on “Will” tied it to the just-previous chapters on “Instinct” (Ch. 24) and “The Emotions” (Ch. 25), two other categories of phenomena that are tied to bodily movements (as we discussed in Chapters 6 and 9). All three of these chapters in Principles, including “Will,” were set up by a preceding treatment of “The Production of Movement” (Ch. 23), which introduced, reiterated, and discussed basic facts of the nervous system and pointed out the effects of sensory stimulation on the movement of blood, oxygen, glands, abdominal viscera, and muscles, thus providing the physiological background for his subsequent chapters on “the more important classes of movement consequent upon cerebro-mental change,” namely, “1) Instinctive or Impulsive Performance; 2) Expressions of Emotion; and 3) Voluntary Deeds” (1003). So when he said, at the start of Chapter 26, that it was time to consider how voluntary movements come about, he was able to contrast voluntary movements with “the movements we have studied hitherto” in the preceding discussions of instinct and emotion, which “have been automatic and reflex, and (on the first occasion of their performance, at any rate) unforeseen by the agent” (1099). To the contrary, he pointed out,
the movements to the study of which we now address ourselves, being desired and intended beforehand, are of course done with full prevision of what they are to be. It follows from this that voluntary movements must be secondary, not primary functions of our organism. This is the first point to understand in the psychology of Volition. Reflex, instinctive, and emotional movements are all primary performances…Of course if such a [reflexive, instinctive, or emotional] reaction has many times occurred we learn what to expect of ourselves, and can then foresee our conduct, even though it remain as involuntary and uncontrollable as it was before. But if, in voluntary action properly so called, the act must be foreseen, it follows that no creature not endowed with divinatory power can perform an act voluntarily for the first time.
And to be more specific about what voluntary action entails, James underscored that it is only “when a particular movement, having once occurred in a random, reflex, or involuntary way, has left an image of itself in the memory” that “the movement can be desired again, proposed as an end, and deliberately willed.” Indeed, “it is impossible to see how it could be willed before” a memorial image of this sort has been established (1099). As a result, “a supply of ideas of the various movements that are possible, left in the memory by experiences of their involuntary performance, is thus the first prerequisite of the voluntary life” (1099–1100). (Although James recognized the strong tendency toward imitation in humans, he seems not to have considered, in this context, what was later called observational learning: how seeing someone else do something enables and makes it more likely that the observer will repeat the observed behavior; but this insight could easily fit within his scheme. See PP 1027 and Bandura 1986.)
The second prerequisite is that “consciousness is in its very nature impulsive” (1134); in other words, that ideas have consequences, and that ideas of movement lead naturally to action. James presented evidence and examples of this in Chapter 26, but in various ways all of Principles leads up to and affirms this conclusion. For instance, it accords with his conviction that consciousness exists for a purpose, that it is teleological, that it loads the dice for the selection of actions more likely to serve some goal of the conscious individual (see Chapter 10 in this book). And it is also a logical consequence of his description of consciousness as a forward-moving stream, not only as experienced mentally but also, significantly, as functionally related to the sensory-motor process. That process entails that “every [sensory] impression which impinges on the incoming nerves produces some discharge down the outgoing ones” (994). As we have seen, some of those impulses pass through the cerebral hemispheres, where the “loop-lines” or “circuits” – we would call them neural networks – are implicated in the formation, storage, and retrieval of ideas (sensations, feelings, images, or thoughts) as part of the ongoing process that eventuates in either the straightforward conduction of those impulses toward a particular motor-muscle or the inhibition and re-direction of them toward other sites and responses (32–42, 73). In either case, ideas, since they are inherently associated with electrophysiological currents, are ipso facto “impulsive.” (We have discussed the interdependence of mental and bodily processes before, especially in Chapter 6, remarking on James’s vacillating conceptualization of psychological and physiological phenomena as running parallel, or as interacting, or as two dimensions of a single process. In the end, all we can say is that James never wavered in his belief in an intimate, unbreakable connection of some kind between mind and body. That is all he needed to assume in his argument regarding voluntary behavior.) In sum, in saying that “consciousness is in its very nature impulsive,” James meant that
we do not have a sensation or a thought, and then have to add something dynamic to it to get a movement. Every pulse of feeling [or thought] which we have is the correlate of some neural activity that is already on its way to instigate a movement.
(1134)
In developing his views on this matter, James borrowed terminology about “ideo-motor action” from the British physiologist and neurologist William B. Carpenter, who had used it in a more restricted clinical context. James, however, expanded Carpenter’s notion to cover the impulsive nature of ideas in general, thus making it the basic template for all human behavior that is not purely instinctive or emotional. For him the terminology covered the instigation of any “sequence of movement upon the mere thought of it” (1130). It could be a relatively simple movement, like pointing or getting up, or a more complicated movement, like riding a bicycle. Either type depends upon a previously learned sequence of movements that, once an image or idea of it is in one’s consciousness, will occur seemingly on its own. (We will stick with examples of externally visible movements here, as James does, though his analysis pertains also to the internal movements correlated with reasoning and what he called “voluntary association” as opposed to thinking or reverie controlled by purely mechanical association. James felt that such cognitive activity had literal physical correlates. See 286–288 and 556.)
The catch, according to James, was that to produce an action, an image or idea must provide a “sufficient mental cue” (1130). In other words, it had to rise to an adequate level of intensity and had to dominate consciousness enough to obviate interference or resistance from some conflicting idea(s). So, if our idea of getting out of bed in the morning is sufficiently strong and regnant in consciousness, before we know it we will be out of bed. But if the idea is weak or in conflict with other ideas, that action will be postponed. (For James’s classic description of getting out of bed on a cold morning, see 1132–1133.) Another example that James used to illustrate “ideo-motor action” was the hypnotic subject whose mind has become totally blank except for the idea suggested to it, who then performs the related action without further thought or hesitation (1132).
Significantly, James pointed out, this kind of action occurs without a separate “act of mental consent” (1134). Therefore, to think of it as “voluntary action” goes against “the popular notion that mere consciousness as such is not essentially a forerunner of activity, that the latter must result from some superadded ‘will-force’” (1134). But James argued against this “common prejudice,” even as he acknowledged that many would think that “voluntary action without ‘exertion of will-power’ is [like] Hamlet with the prince’s part left out” (1134). Although he didn’t say more about this, the presumption (at least for this reader) is that he wanted to underscore that thinking (consciousness) itself, with its actively selective nature, makes action personal and to that extent voluntary, in contrast to the entirely reflexive expressions of instinct and emotion. Still, the example of the hypnotic subject (even though his or her idea – and hence action – were artificially induced) hardly supports the notion that ideas in one’s mind must be personally selected, and in the absence of further argument on James’s part, many readers are likely to conclude that his three-way scheme of action – as instinctive, emotional, or voluntary – is insufficient to cover behavior that seems at best potentially or partially rather than actually or fully voluntary, as that word is commonly understood. Perhaps it is best, as later comments by James suggest, to consider all of these terms – instinctive and emotional as well as voluntary – as admitting of degrees of instinctiveness, emotionality, and voluntariness. (E.g., see 1066 where James speaks of certain situations as being “most voluntary.”) In any case, James’s key point seems to be that there is no separate mental faculty of the kind known as “the will” that must act after or alongside consciousness to account for voluntary behavior. This interpretation of what he meant to convey accords with his subsequent treatment of more complicated instances of willing.
Whatever one thinks about the designation of any action that occurs with “no hiatus between the thought-process and the motor discharge” as “voluntary” (1135), there are other instances of voluntary action in which the initial state of mind is not sufficient to instigate action, and James proceeded to a consideration of such instances, all of which involve “deliberation” of one kind or another, though only the last kind involves “an additional conscious element, in the shape of a fiat, mandate, or express consent,” which “has to intervene and precede the movement” (1130). (Fiat is Latin for “let it be done” or “let it be so.”) As we shall see, the other kinds illustrate, as did the simple non-deliberative kind he had already discussed, that once an idea of action has become sufficiently strong and uncontested, the action will occur without the introduction of any additional factor.
Deliberation occurs before action, James argued, only “when the mind is the seat of many ideas related to each other in antagonistic or in favorable ways.” The result in this situation is “that peculiar feeling of inward unrest known as indecision.” While one is undecided, “the reinforcing and inhibiting ideas…are termed the reasons or motives by which the decision is [to be] brought about.” The entire process of deliberation “contains endless degrees of complication,” which James described in his typically memorable way, emphasizing that indecision and deliberation “may last for weeks or months, occupying at intervals the mind” (1136). But if and when the matter is resolved, it tends to occur in certain typical ways:
(1) By being reasonable, so that “the arguments for and against a given course seem gradually and almost insensibly to settle themselves in the mind,” leading to an “easy transition from doubt to assurance” in which “we seem to ourselves almost passive” to “reasons,” though we have “a perfect sense of being free, in that we are devoid of any feeling of coercion.” Generally, this involves “the discovery that we can refer the [particular] case to a class upon which we are accustomed to act unhesitatingly in a certain stereotyped way” (1138). Thus, “in action as in reasoning…the great thing is the quest of the right conception” (1139). Once it is there, the decision and action occur without any overt assertion. The action simply takes place upon the disappearance of antagonistic feelings or ideas.
(2) By going with the flow created by external situations, so that we “drift with a certain indifferent acquiescence in a direction accidentally determined from without,” typically in circumstances where either course of action seems good and “no paramount and authoritative reason for either course” seems likely to come (1139). At some point deliberation is simply suspended as one imagined course of action comes to predominate.
(3) By going with the flow to avoid internal situations, so that an “intolerable pent-up state” of perplexity and suspense, in “the absence of imperative principle,” is dissipated by acting one way or another, usually with little premeditation and frequently with a “fatalistic mood” in “persons of strong emotional endowment and unstable or vacillating character” (1140). One simply acts to minimize inner perturbance.
(4) By undergoing a change in character, so that “we suddenly pass from the easy and careless to the sober and strenuous mood, or possibly the other way,” upon “some outer experience or some inexplicable inward charge” that changes “the whole scale of values of our motives and impulses,” thus constituting the kind of “changes of heart” or “awakenings of conscience” that “make new men of so many of us” (1140). This type involves a sort of conversion with behavioral consequences.
(5) By making what we feel to be a willful act, whether or not “the evidence is all in” and “reason has balanced the books.” This resolution of deliberation involves a “feeling of effort” that is “absent from the former decisions.” Unlike the previous cases, in which any alternative choice drops “wholly or nearly out of sight,” in this case “both alternatives are steadily held in view, and in the very act of murdering the vanquished possibility the chooser realizes how much in that instant he is making himself lose.” This accounts for “the sense of inward effort with which the act is accomplished” (1141). The selected action results from one option – one idea of action – being elevated and held sufficiently above the other (or others).
What James wanted to emphasize here is that “the immense majority of human decisions,” illustrated by the first four types of deliberation, occur “without effort” (1141). We think otherwise, he asserted, only because “during deliberation we so often have a feeling of how great an effort it would take to make a decision now” (1141–1142). Still, there are instances of the fifth type of decision-making, which involves a feeling of effort “as a phenomenal fact in our consciousness” (1142), and James proceeded to elaborate upon them. One obvious thing that characterizes such situations, he noted, is that they occur when the impulsive power of one idea is blocked by the inhibitory power of another. A classic case is when the impulsive power of an idea representing an “object of passion” confronts the inhibitory power of an idea representing some ethical ideal. In discussing such conflicts, James made interesting observations about the “healthiness of will” necessary for deliberation to be resolved by a fiat that leads to the actualization of the accepted “vision” or idea (1143). He also wrote about the “unhealthiness of will” that can lead to either an “explosive will,” unable to inhibit impulses, or an “obstructed will,” unable to allow the expression of impulses: in short, a mind (or more properly, a self) that is by nature or nurture either impulsive or inhibited (1143–1154). Although the unhealthy situation is interesting in its own right, we are concerned here with the healthy mind in which deliberation can reach a conclusion that is not compulsive. And this draws us to consider the feeling of effort that is associated with the willful fiat.
Reminding his readers that he did not equate effort with all manifestations of voluntary action, James remarked that “effort complicates volition,” especially “whenever a rarer and more ideal impulse is called upon to neutralize others of a more instinctive and habitual kind” and “whenever strongly explosive tendencies are checked, or strongly obstructive conditions overcome” (1154). Acknowledging that “our spontaneous way of conceiving the effort, under all these circumstances, is as an active force adding its strength to that of the motives which ultimately prevail,” James pointed out that effort in such cases differs from a physical force that operates “in the line of least resistance” (1154). Moral effort, instead, is “in the line of the greatest resistance.” It reinforces a “small voice” that would not otherwise be heard much less prevail. And to underscore his point, he offered the following equation, in which I stands for an imperative or ideal impulse, P for a propensity or natural impulse, and E for effort:
The equation indicates that the ideal by itself is weaker than the propensity, but when effort is added to it, which is to say, when it is added to the impulsive idea of the ideal, its strength or intensity becomes greater than that of the natural tendency (1155). As a result, even if the tendency and its representation cannot be banished altogether (thus allowing the ‘right’ idea to take full occupancy of consciousness), the selected idea may be sufficiently increased in intensity so that it occasions ideo-motor action. And here James came to focus on what for him was the main element with regard to willing in conflicted situations: The willful effort is not lent directly to the exercise of musculature, but rather it is devoted to attending to the selected idea, to holding it firmly in the focus of one’s mind, essentially increasing its intensity relative to the reduced consciousness of the propensity, so that the idea itself can trigger its muscular counterpart(s). As James wrote, “we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition when we ask by what process it is that the thought of any given object comes to prevail stably in the mind.” The answer is simply that “attention with effort is all that any case of volition implies.” So, “the essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to ATTEND to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind. The so-doing is the fiat” (1166). In short and in sum, “effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will” (1167).
James spent a good many pages laying out facts and arguments in support of this view as well as distinguishing his view from the more typical utilitarian account of action based on the effects of pleasure and pain. (His view assimilates ideas or previsions of pleasure and pain as contestants for conscious attention, that is, as possible but far from the only possible motives for action. See 1156–1164.) But the basic nub of his analysis of will is that
the volitional effort lies exclusively within the mental world. The whole drama is a mental drama. The whole difficulty is a mental difficulty, a difficulty with an object of our thought…Consent to the idea’s undivided presence, this is effort’s sole achievement. Its only function is to get this feeling of consent into the mind…The idea…must be held steadily before the mind until it fills the mind.
(1168–1169)
And this applies to how unwanted impulses are inhibited as much as to how favored ones are facilitated. The drinker who holds a disgusting image of himself as a dissolute drunkard before his consciousness is more likely to stop drinking than the one who entertains images of pleasurable escape (1169).
So, willing always revolves around steadfast attention to an idea according to James. But sometimes this isn’t enough. Sometimes, in conflicted situations, a supplemental dimension of the fiat is needed. Although James called it “an additional and quite distinct phenomenon” (1172), it is not so much an additional happening as what we might better call an attendant attitude, as he actually put it elsewhere (1173). Typically this is required in situations of conflict in which a single thought does not occupy the mind exclusively or sufficiently, as in the fifth type of decision discussed above. In these instances, “the effort to attend” is “only a part of what the word ‘will’ covers.” It also covers “the effort to consent to something to which our attention is not quite complete.” So, “although attention is the first and fundamental thing in volition, express consent to the reality of what is attended to” is often needed (1172). Here, in the fullest expression of the fiat, “we say, let it be a reality” (1173). James described this supplemental experience in his usually perceptive way:
To the word ‘is’ and to the words ‘let it be’ there correspond peculiar attitudes of consciousness which it is vain to seek to explain. The indicative and imperative moods are as much ultimate categories of thinking as they are of grammar…From the ‘don’t care’ state of mind to that in which ‘we mean business,’ is one of the most familiar things in life.
(1173)
Yet even when this attitude is firmly in place and there is no doubt that we mean business, the fiat may not initiate the willed-for action. There are limits to willing, or more precisely to its effects, as James clarified in remarking on the psychological and physiological processes involved in voluntary action:
With the prevalence, once there as a fact, of the motive idea the psychology of volition properly stops. The movements which ensue are exclusively physiological phenomena, following according to physiological laws upon the neural events to which the idea corresponds. The willing terminates with the prevalence of the idea; and whether the act then follows or not is a matter quite immaterial, so far as the willing itself goes. I will to write, and the act follows. I will to sneeze, and it does not. I will that the distant table slide over the floor towards me; it also does not. My willing representation can no more instigate my sneezing-centre than it can instigate the table to activity. But in both cases it is as true and good willing as it was when I willed to write. In a word, volition is a psychic or moral act pure and simple, and is absolutely completed when the stable state of the idea is there. The supervention of motion is a supernumerary phenomenon depending on executive ganglia whose function lies outside the mind.
(1165)
Here ends our explication of James’s theory of will, the ultimate expression of consciousness and its active, ever-ongoing selective attention.
Perhaps the best illustration of what James had in mind and why this topic had particular resonance for him is provided, not in Principles, but twelve years later in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), in a recounting of what had happened in James’s own life in the early 1870s. Besieged one evening by abhorrent images that he feared were literally driving him insane – images of what he would become if he continued to be overwhelmed by them – he willfully focused his attention instead upon salvific Biblical phrases, chanting over and over to himself such things as “The eternal God is my refuge” and “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden.” He was convinced that if he had not kept his mind on these phrases, concentrating with sustained effort upon them, he would in fact have fallen into insanity (VRE 135-135; see Leary 2015, Part II, for more information).
This experience was crucially important in James’s own life, and was intertwined with the process by which he came to believe in the efficacy of human will, of the kind articulated in his later theory of will. As we have already seen at the end of our discussion of his views on attention, he did not believe that anyone could prove whether or not attention is an independent cause as opposed to a mere effect of some other cause, and he admitted that his own belief in the causal efficacy of attention was based largely on ethical considerations. Toward the end of his chapter on “Will,” he expressed a similar conviction regarding the question of free will, saying that this question is “insoluble on strictly psychological grounds” (1176). I will not repeat his arguments about this (see 1173–1182) because they raise precisely the same issues that were discussed earlier – unsurprisingly, since attention and will were for him essentially the same thing. I will note, however, his telling remark that “the most probing question we are ever asked” – and “we are asked it every hour of the day” – is “Will you or won’t you have it so?” (1182). How deeply James felt about this question is readily apparent in the rhetorical flourish of his personal response:
We answer [the question of whether we will have it so, or not] by consents or non-consent and not by words. What wonder that these dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of communication with the nature of things! What wonder if the effort demanded by them be the measure of our worth as men! What wonder if the amount which we accord of it be the one strictly underived and original contribution which we make to the world!
(1182)
Having said this, James ended his chapter on “Will” with a section that serves largely as an appendix, in which he offered some “protracted physiological speculations” on the neural circuitry involved in voluntary behavior. In the course of these speculations he emphasized that “the drainage currents and discharges of the brain are not purely physical facts. They are psycho-physical facts, and the spiritual [i.e., psychological] quality of them seems a codeterminant of the mechanical effectiveness” (1186). This claim – and his entire belief in will – was soon characterized as wishful thinking by many of his contemporaries and successors, and still is by many others, even though recent studies of the effects of meditation and other cognitive processes upon neurological states, as shown by neuro-electric and neuro-imaging technologies, have made it seem far less fanciful: indeed, to more than a few, his contentions now seem demonstrably factual (for a good overview, see Cahn and Polich 2006). Still, it must be emphasized that, according to James, the mind “creates nothing” and “is at the mercy of the material forces for all [its] possibilities” (1186). Even if the will is free and hence the human self is a true agent within the world, James presents a very circumscribed picture of what that freedom and agency mean. It clearly does not entail “a metaphysical principle of activity” or a belief that the willing person is “a supernatural agent,” James reiterated in 1905 (see EA 93). Still, whatever ‘wiggle room’ we humans have, James felt that it makes all the difference in the world. It gives us leverage to express ourselves and reason to assume responsibility for our actions, however restricted the range of that responsibility, of those actions, and of their results might be.
Given how important attention and will were for James, he would be very, very pleased to see the revival of scientific interest in these two topics over the past decades. Issues of attention and will have never disappeared from applied psychology. (One thinks of the famous behavioral therapist who was told by his own therapist, when unable to cease smoking despite adherence to a regime of behavior modification, that, after all, “you have to try”!) But for more than half a century attention and will were largely absent from scientific psychology. Now, however, attention is once again the subject of intense research, and its significance in a variety of subfields of psychology and philosophy is well established (see Mole, Smithies, and Wu 2011 and Posner 2003). Similarly, and even more surprisingly, one hears talk again about will, and even leading scientific psychologists speak of “thoughts causing behavior” (Baumeister, Masicampo, and Vohs 2011), a “psychology of human agency” (Bandura 2006), and the significance of “willpower” (Baumeister and Tierney 2011). (See also Pockett, Banks, and Gallagher 2006 and Umiltá 2007.) Such talk remains controversial (see, e.g., Wegner 2002), but the controversy is now within the mainstream of psychological thought.
Since the issue of will remains controversial, and is still considered by many to be an “unscientific” matter, a few parting quotations may help level the playing field as well as give due credit to James. Bernard J. Baars (1997), a leading authority on scientific studies of consciousness, in referring to “the psychology of voluntary control,” has stated that “William James’s chapters ‘Will,’ ‘Habit,’ and ‘Instinct’ in The Principles of Psychology are still indispensable and fascinating” (141). Mark Balaguer (2014), a philosopher who focuses particularly upon the question of free will, has concluded, after a thorough review, that “the anti-free-will arguments that have been put forward recently by philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists simply don’t work. And so we don’t have any good reason to doubt the existence of free will.” But he hastens to add, in a very James-like way, “I have not argued…that we do have free will. I’ve simply blocked the arguments for the claim that we don’t have free will” (121). As a neuroscientific (and not just philosophical) question, he says, “we are nowhere near ready to answer it” (122). And perhaps the most relevant voice, since his research is so often cited as proof that consciousness is an after-effect that follows upon neurological determination of cognitive as well as behavioral responses, is that of the neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet (2002), who has written:
My conclusion about free will, one genuinely free in the nondetermined sense, is…that its existence is at least as good, if not a better, scientific option than is its denial by determinist theory. Given the speculative nature of both determinist and nondeterminist theories, why not adopt the view that we do have free will (until some real contradictory evidence may appear, if it ever does)? Such a view would at least allow us to proceed in a way that accepts and accommodates our own deep feeling that we do have free will. We would not need to view ourselves as machines that act in a manner completely controlled by the known physical laws. Such a permissive option has also been advocated by the neurobiologist [and Nobel laureate] Roger Sperry.
(563)
Again, echoes of William James!
Finally, the philosopher and James scholar Gerald E. Myers (1986) has shared his own carefully considered opinion that, despite frequent criticism and rejection, “James’s theorizing on the overlap between will and attention has been permanently stimulating” and “as is often true of his philosophical psychology, professionals and non-professionals alike have found in it a fund of practical insights for their own lives” (209).
In sum, James’s chapters on “Attention” and “Will” still reward interested readers.