Recent studies of the behaviour of the lowest organisms have led to widely divergent results, according as the investigator has made the stimulus or the organism, so to say, the unit of his work. If he keeps his attention on the stimulus, and tries to ascertain the direct effect upon movement of light, heat, gravitation, the organism may appear as a bundle of tropisms, of direct and uniform motor responses. If he keeps his attention on the organism, starts—out fromjts total behaviour, and tries to reduce this total to a number of elementary responses, he finds that " these lower organisms furnish problems which do not differ in kind from what we find in higher animals. To the same stimuli different y M § 125. The Genesis of Action 455 organisms react differently; different individuals of the same species react differently; and even the same individual reacts differently at different times."1 The analytical method, which proceeds from total behavjojir to plementary reaction, is with- out question, as a method of first attack, more reliable than the synthetic method, which attempts to build up a.complejL.be^ haviour out of simplest elements; and we may therefore conclude that observation of the lowest organisms is at least not unfavour- able to our own theory of action.
This theory finds, however, a special difficulty in the problem - of the first movement of the first moving organism, — the first vital movement that was made upon the planet. By hypothesis, that movement was conscious: but how was the organism sug- gestible? It is the first organism; it has had no past; conscious- "~~ness comes into being with its birth; how can it 'reply' or 'respond' to stimulation? We can only guess. But we may guess that a fallacy lurks in the seemingly innocent statement <fthat the organism has had no past. We must believe that the organic arises from the inorganic, that life is derived from the not-living; but we are not bound to believe that the transition - was abrupt. On the contrary, it is probable that nature (if 1 Lwe may speak metaphorically) made many essays at life before a stable, self-sustaining life was struck out; that there were many intermediate stages between the non-vital and the vital, many imperfect modes of half-life, part-life, which were instable and v^fcherefore transient, but which none the less bridged the gulf *r between the inanimate and the animate worlds. Hence the first living thing would have had a past, a half-vital ancestry; <and this past would have moulded it, given it direction, rendered. /_Q, it susceptible on some sides and resistant on others; in a word, j/jy* would have done for it, in a crude way, precisely what our ancestry ? does, in an indefinitely more complicated way, for ourselves. So the difficulty is met — speculatively, it is true, but by aspecula- 1 H. S. Jennings, Diverse Ideals and Divergent Conclusions in the Study of Behaviour in Lower Organisms, in American Journal of Psychology, xxi., V 456 Action tion which does not conflict with the general doctrine of organic evolution, and by speculation at all only because there is no other means of meeting it.
Let us accept the view that the first movements of the first organisms were conscious movements. What happens to the action consciousness in the course of evolution?
An examination of our own actions shows that, in the course of the individual lifetime, this consciousness takes two different roads. On the one hand, we are continually enlarging our sphere of action; conduct grows more comp_lex_j there is a tendency towards more and more com- licated and specific coordination of movements; and the realisation of this tendency is always accompanied by increasing complexity of consciousness, by the mental processes and attitudes known as choice., rejsjDlyj^jlelibera- tion, comparison, judgment, doubt. On the other hand, there is a tendency toward the simplification of movement, and the realisation of this tendency is accompanied by lapse of consciousness. Plasticity, that is, subsists along- side of fixity.
If, now, this analogy is to be trusted, we should expect to find the same combination, of plasticity and fixity of re- action, all through the animal kingdom. But we should expect to find the two tendencies combined in unequal measure. Man is preeminently plastic, educable in a supreme degree. We should expect that, perhaps at the other end of the organic scale, rapid fixation of movement leaves but a small margin of plasticity. We find, in fact, something much more interesting; we find that the line of animal descent bifurcates, the one branch leading to fixity with a minimum of plasticity, the other leading to § 125. The Genesis of Action 45 f plasticity with a minimum of fixity. The action conscious- ness thus appears to have a double history, whose parallel chapters throw welcome light, the one upon the other.
Zoologists divide the animal kingdom into two great groups, whose lines of descent are distinct as far down as the flat- worms. The one of these leads through the unsegmented and segmented worms to the insects, spiders and crustaceans; the other leads through various invertebrate forms, largely extinct, to the verte- brates, and so finally to man. Students of animal behaviour abo divide the animals into two great groups, those that are markedly plastic in their responses to stimulation, and those that are mark- edly fixed. The interesting point to us is that these groupings coincide. It has been seriously argued, e.g., that ants and bees are pure automata, mindless reflex machines; and though this ex- treme position is not generally taken, it is agreed that the popular ascription of intelligence to these creatures falls wide of the mark.
In the author's view, we have here a confirmation of the theory that consciousness is as old as life. The action consciousness persists, as it were in equilibrium, from the protozoa to the flat- worms. There its path diverges: on the one side lie neural fixity and unconscious response, on the other lie neural plasticity and conscious response. But these alternatives are not absolute; survival requires both fixity and plasticity; the divergence, as we might expect from the common path that precedes it, is a diver- gence of emphasis, not a complete separation.
Further details — the probable proportion of fixity and plasticitv in particular forms, the reason for the extinction of the interme- diate types in the vertebrate line — cannot here be discussed. But a word of caution may be added. The lowest organisms that exist to-day have, we must remember, an ancestry that is presum- ably as long as that of man. They may have remained what, by the theory, they originally were, psychophysical organisms; but they may also have lost the flicker of mind that they at first pos- sessed, and have hardened into unconscious machines. If proof could be brought that all the present protozoa are unconscious, — 458 Action 458 Action the assumption is on all accounts improbable, but we make it for argument's sake, — if this proof could be brought, our theory would still be unshaken \ for the fact would simply mean that, in the course of ages, the protozoa had travelled the whole distance from plasticity to fixity, and had thus lost an original animal char- acteristic.
§ 126. The Classification of Action. — Our discussion of the genesis of action, while it has shown that the instabil- ity of the action consciousness is a native and universal character, racial and individual alike, has for that very reason failed to provide us with a typical pattern. We cannot, perhaps, do better than recur to the schematic ac- tion of p. 448: the consciousness whose predetermination is represented b,y the idea of <*™A aH *ho kinaeslhesislhat means ' You arc to move'; which culminates in the appre- hension of some object under the influence of the idea of end; and which concludes with the perception of result and the sensations aroused by movement. Such a con- sciousness, singly determined, and rounding its course from idea of end or result to perception of result, and from an- ticipatory kinaesthesis to the kinaesthetic accompaniment of movement made, may he termed an impulse.
Impulsive action then degenerates, first, to ideomotor or sensorimotor action, in which the predetermination is un- conscious, and the idea or perception of the object at once touches off the movement. Some one says to us, ' There's a caterpillar on your hair! ' and we raise our hand and brush the caterpillar away. Or wc are talking interestedly and, without interruption of the thought, pass a hand over our hair. Finding a caterpillar there, we may say, 'Ah! I thought I felt something,' and fling it away. From this level the descent continues to the level of the secondary § 126. The Classification of Action 459 reflex. The author has evidence that he has made a localising movement, and flicked an insect off his knee, without knowing that he was going to move, that he had moved, that the insect had settled, or that he had re- moved it.
The.impulse may also travel in the opposite direction, towards complication of consciousness. An action may be subject to more than one determination; it may be the expression of a hierarchy of determinations. And it may result from a conflict of impulses, just as secondary atten- tion results from a conflict of primary attentions (p. 272). We then have what is ordinarily termed voluntary action, — though this name is so variously employed that we shall do best to avoid it, and to speak of selective action. This, in its turn, degenerates; first, into ideomotor or sensorimotor action, and then into a reflex. The skilled pianist reads off a musical score at sight; the thought of mail time sends us downstairs with our letters. Or, at the lowest level, our fingers move over the keyboard of the typewriter auto- ^ matically, while attention is wholly occupied with the mat- ter to be written.
In § 76 we illustrated the development of secondary attention by appeal to an imaginary animal, endowed with two sense-organs. The conflict of impulses may be illustrated, at all its stages, from actual experience. When a young child comes face to face with a strange dog, it behaves as if pulled back and forth by strings; it goes up to the dog, runs back to its father, approaches the dog again, and so on. It has happened to the author, in presence of the two impulses to shut a door on the right and to seat himself at a desk on the left, to begin a right-hand movement towards the door, and then all at once to slue round to the desk, without having closed it. Here we have the conflict of impulses at its nakedest. The case is very different — though the extremes are Action Action connected by a host of intermediate consciousnesses — when the impulses derive from a number of determining and associative tendencies, and when the object is a complex situation. Here psychology is sorely in need of further analyses. We can say, however, from the results of experiments upon the compound re- actions, that consciousness need be neither so full nor so logical as the psychologies usually represent it; determinations may be carried in very fragmentary terms, and a wide range of reflective consideration may be packed into a conscious attitude.
The mechanism of selective action is, in principle, understood. It is different with what we may call volitional action, in which an impulse comes into conflict, not with another impulse, but with some associative constellation that has no motor reference. I hear my alarum-clock, and have the impulse to get out of bed; but the impulse is definitely opposed by the idea of another half-hour's sleep. If I get up, I perform a volitional action. What has happened? And what happens if I do not get up?
In the scanty analyses of the cognitive choice reaction that we possess, the reaction in which white was to be reacted upon and other stimuli disregarded (p. 440), the negative instruction came to consciousness either as an ' assurance ' that the given stimulus was not to be replied to, or as a fplrinhihjtinn of rnov^mpn1,j i.e., an unusually strong pressure upon the, key from which the finger was slipped in the movement of reaction. Experiments upon the associative reaction, in which a negative instruction was given, have recently been reported: pictures were exposed, and the re- actor was required to speak the first word that occurred to him, unless it were the name of the object pictured; the name was not to be uttered. Unfortunately, there was no systematic introspection during the fore-period. The mid-period showed various types of consciousness. Thus the name may appear, in internal speech, with a tendency to its utterance; then come ttheJthoug_ht ' that it must not be spokenr and a ' Lwl-ing ' r.f tlio th.v-.ot- ^ngrW ■ and then the, fitting association is given. Sometimes the thought \/ alone, sometimes the locking alone, is enough to guide the reaction. Or the thought of the instruction may prevent even the appearance § 126. The Classification of Action 461 of the name, after the object has been apprehended. Or, again, the reactor changes the ijstrnrtion_Jmm negative to positive; he observes the details of the picture, asks TnmselTwTiat might be done with the object, and so specialises the association. Finally, we have sheer automatism; the name may appear in internal speech, but it is at once suppressed, without conscious represen- tation of the suppression; or, in extreme cases, the apprehension of the picture touches off directly the appropriate association.
These results are interesting in themselves; they show us some of the conscious aspects of the suppression of one determining tendency by another. They also help us to understand the volitional action. A positive instruction, we may suppose, opens certain nervous channels, but at The same time blocks other channels; it acts not only positively, by facilitation, but also negatively, by inhibition (p. 300). So a negative instruction Mf^ig rfXtxin rViannftk, but at the same time opens_pthers; it, too, acts positively as well as negatively. My alarum-clock, then, not only opens the getting-up channels, but interferes with the nervous set — whatever tha1- yriPY ^ Ti'hi"h keeps me lying still; while the idea of another half- hour's sleep means not only the reinforcement of this nervous set, but also a positive blocking of the suggestion from the clock. The notion of the cortical mech- anism as of this double-faced, positive-negative kind does away with the mystery of the conflict in volitional action, though we must add the usual caution, that nothing in detail is known of the subject. — We remarked, jn § 103 that words are originally gestures; the \v£Ltd_-GefisciQiis_ness is therefore an.action consciousness. Speech and writing are, in fact, symbolic, actions: and they may be selective or volitional, or they may appear in the ideomotor and reflex forms. The signing of my name to a deed is the expression of a highly complex determination; under other circumstances, if I have a pen in my hand and paper before me during a com- mittee meeting, I may write my name again and again, quite unconsciously. The^stu4y-oLgesture_|n_jeneral is a study in the history of symbolic actions; and the symbolism may, at any \A 462 Action \A 462 Action moment, reappear; a particular hand-shake, or the doffing of the hat to a certain acquaintance, may imply reconciliation or social recognition, and may thus be as complex in its determination as the signing of the deed. All this means — what may have been obvious to the reader long ago, and what follows from our insist- ence upon the fact of determination — that the bodily movement is, in so complicated an organism as man, no index to the action consciousness. To say that 'signing one's name is a voluntary action ' is to say what may or may not be true j it may be a highly elaborate selective action, or it may be a secondary reflex.
There remain the actions which bring into play an in- herited mechanism, or express an inherited nervous dis- position: the physiological reflexes and the instinctive movements. The former we believe to have had a racial history that parallels the individual history of the second- ary reflexes. The latter include a great variety of move- ments, from complex or serial reflexes up to massive reactions that arc accompanied by a highly insistent con- sciousness. No agreement has so far been reached, as regards either the definition of instinct or its place in the hierarchy of human actions; but it seems safe to say that the instinctive movement, whatever else it may be, is always initiated by the release of an inherited disposition; that the instinctive consciousness resembles the impulsive, but is richer in organic components; and that there is a very close connection between instinctive and emotive reactions.
Instinct has long been one of the catchwords of popular psychology; even now it stands next only to ' feeling ' in loose- ness of usage and multiplicity of application; and it does scientific harm, where feeling is innocent, by its profession to explain, to name the cause of action; animals act ' on instinct,' while man, at any rate in his specially human moods, acts ' by reason.' There § 126. The Classification of Action 463 is some excuse for this laxity and confusion, for the phenomena of instinct are of wide range and great complexity. We must, however, ourselves be clear; and we shall achieve clearness most easily by calling to mind the two great branches of the animal kingdom, with their opposed characters of predominating fixity and predominating plasticity. Fixity of response means response by way of an inherited nervous mechanism, purely instinctive response; and it is, in fact, among the insects that we find what are probably the most striking examples of purely instinctive action. Plasticity of response means response by way of an ac- quired nervous mechanism; and it is in man that we find the mjst numerous, the most varied and the most complicated ex- amples of non-instinctive action. On the other hand, as we saw no ground for supposing that, in the one line of descent, fixity has entirely replaced plasticity, so we have no ground for denying that, in the other, plasticity is based upon an underlying fixity. Apart from the logical absurdity of an absolute plasticity, we come, again and again, upon evidence that our own determining ten- dencies are inherited. In so far as this is the case, our actions are instinctive.
As to the existence of an instinctive consciousness, opinions differ. " The idea of consciousness must be rigidly excluded from any definition of instinct; " " any definition of instinctive action that does not insist upon its psychical aspect is misleading; " so the authorities! It is better to appeal to the facts. And the facts show us that actions which proceed from inherited deter- mination (the physiological reflexes excluded) are in this respect like other actions; they show..alLstages^ from full consciousness to complete unconsciousness. There can, however, be no question that the instinctive action, in the middle of its career, is attended bxa_coflsxiousness of characteristic pattern and" of a high degree of complexity.
If we try to work out a rough classification of instincts, we find at the lower end of the scale a number of movements that grade off into the reflex, — such things as coughing, smiling, sneezing, swallowing, threading our way on the street, beating time to 464 Action music; or, in the human infant, such things as sucking, biting, clasping, turning the head aside, standing, creeping, walking, cry- ing, vocalising. These are definite responses to particular stimuli. At the upper end of the scale, we find large, general tendencies: the tendency that makes ns_taka-*ka^rnrld pf pprrqTFTnn u-i world of real things; the empathic tendency that makes us humanise our surroundings, animate and inanimate alike; the social tendency that makes us imitative and credulous (' suggestible ' in a narrower sense: cf. p. 449); the tendency to dual division, closely connected with the polar opposition of pleasantness-unpleasantness, which makes us classify the world by pairs, good-bad, active-passive, etc.; the tendency to try things out, which is largely responsible for pjay, and the tendency to let things be, which is largely responsible for the laziness of a life of routine: — these and other tendencies, which represent total directive pressures laid upon the organism, more strongly upon some individuals and more weakly upon others, but in some measure upon all; and which are realised or expressed on very various occasions, and with very varying accom- paniment of consciousness. Between these extremes lie what we may term the instincts proper: feaj, love, jealousy, rivalry, curios- ity, pugnacity, repulsion, self-abasement, seIf:as_s,ertion, and so on. No complete list, with verifiable terms, has as yet been made out; and no adequate analysis of the instinctive consciousness has been undertaken. In general, the consciousness is of the action type: it differs from the inipulsive consciousness in comprising, massive complexes of organic. sens^i"1"1: it changes as the action is repeated, thinning out into sensorimotor forms, or enriching itself by association, according to circumstances; it passes ovej^wjthout any sharp line of division, into emotion. On the physiological side, the instinctive reaction is a reaction of the whole organism, not of some organ or member. The determining tendencies which underlie it may be touched off, not only by their proper stimuli, but by other, like stimuli (§ 107); they are often transi- tory, ripening at a definite period cf the individual lifetime, and then decaying again; they are subject to inhibition and reinforcernejU; both by other determining and by associative tendencies, § 126. The Classification of Action 465 so that their expression in movement is extrenie-h/^variable; and, like the tendencies set up by instruction (p. 449), ^fiy ar* 1iah1p_to specialisation, to become "systematically organised about certain objects or ideas."
All this must, unfortunately, be left in general terms, though the plan and programme of a psychology of instinct seem clear enough. The term is common to two distinct sciences, psychology and biology; and the result of this community has been that the psychologists are tempted to write a speculative biology, and the biologists to manufacture a psychology of instinct. The mutual recrimination that has ensued is a doubtful gain to science. What we have to do is to leave biology to formulate its own problem, and to accept its solution of that problem, while we ourselves, as psychologists, describe and explain the instinctive consciousness.
Our classification is herewith complete; we have made out a family tree for action, and have assigned the various types to their genetic places in it. Let the reader now be warned not to take the classification too seriously! At the best, classification — whether of perceptions, or of associations, or of actions or of anything else — is not psychology, but only a more or less useful preliminary to psychology. And, in the present instance, we have an unfortunate disjunction of psychological analysis and classification. Analysis has begun, rightly enough, with the reaction experiment; but the reactions to be analysed have not been shaped in accord- ance with current classifications of action; the analysis has rather proceeded, on the old lines, from the simple to the compound reaction, as if the reaction experiment were a thing apart. Our classifications, on the other hand, are the product of a reflective, non-experimental psychology; we have no introspective guarantee of their adequacy. So we are in this curious position: that we possess a fairly / large body of observations of the action consciousness, and 2H 466 Action 2H 466 Action a number of professedly complete classifications of action, and nevertheless are unable to bring the two together. In such circumstances, we shall be wise to accept the observa- tions, and not to commit ourselves positively to any system of classification.
§ 127. Will. — The familiar division of mental pheno- mena into those of intellect, feeling and will is a legacy from the psychology of the eighteenth century. The terms are still in use as class-names: intellect for the experiences based on sensation and image, feeling for the whole of our affective experience (p. 228), and will for the facts of atten- tion and action. Their definition is, however, extremely fluctuating. Thus, imagination is treated, in recent books, under all three headings; and will is sometimes restricted to secondary attention and selective and volitional action, sometimes divorced from attention altogether.
It would, then, be unnecessary to devote a special Section to will, were it not that there is a specific will conscious- ness. The observers in the reaction experiment report, without hesitation, that their response was or was not willed The essential factor in this will consciousness appears to be a conscious ' acceptance ' of the instruction.
If a foreign stimulus is introduced into a series of muscular re- actions, the reactor, who is prepared by the suggestion 'as quickly as possible,' moves in response to it, but is clear that the action was not willed. If a stimulus of the same general kind as the reg- ular stimulus is introduced, e.g., a red in place of a white card, the reactor may be in doubt whether the action was willed or not. In general, any consciousness which is consciously referred to an in- struction accepted by the reactor is reported as a will conscious- ness. Will thus differs, introspectively, on the one hand from the purely associative consciousness, based upon the play of associative tendencies; and, on the other hand, from the consciousness of command, where there is determination, but not an ' acceptance ' of determination. So far as analysis has gone, this acceptance appears as an organic set which carries the mean- ing ' I agree.' Both terms in the meaning are emphatic; there is a reference to the psychological self, and there is an intention to yield, to acquiesce.1 It is rarely, however, that the will attitude be- comes either explicit or focal. As a rule it is, so to say, incor- porated in the total reaction consciousness; the organic sensations which constitute it are blended with the other conscious contents; the reactor does not know that he is willing, but if questioned afterwards declares that he did will. With repetition of the action, and in default of renewed instruction, it disappears altogether.
We shall have more to say of the will attitude when we come to deal with the conscious attitudes in general (pp. 519 f).
Conation. — The Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology writes of conation as follows: " the theoretical active element of conscious- ness, showing itself in tendencies, impulses, desires and acts of volition. Stated in its most general form, conation is unrest. It exists when and so far as a present state of consciousness tends by its intrinsic nature to develope into something else." These sentences seem to mean that consciousnesses like impulse and desire contain an elementary process of unrest, which cannot be isolated and examined for itself, but the assumption of which is necessary to a full description; and that such consciousnesses, in virtue of the interfused unrest, are themselves restless, actively tiransitory, and travel of their own accord to their own extinction.
The question of the existence of an active element of unrest can be decided only by appeal to experimental introspection. Wundt, as we have seen, posits an elementary excitement and an elemen- tary tension; but these processes are, for him, affections. The investigators of the reaction consciousness, in all their hundreds