Action of this rudimentary kind may be termed action tipon presentatio7i. A stimulus was presented; it attracted the attention; movement followed. The animal had never formed any idea of its own movement, because it had never moved voluntarily before; it did not know what sort of mental processes would be set up by movement; it did not know that it was going to move. But so soon as the excitation corresponding to the idea of the stimulus had been reinforced by other excitatory processes, — so soon as the stimulus was attended to, — motor excitation was set up, and a movement made. — In action upon 1 One might be inclined to think that there would be another condition, — the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the object. But for the primitive organism, attention to anything but the intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant is impossible: attention and affection are always obverse and reverse of the same process (§ 38).
240 Voluntary Movement. Analysis of Action presentation we have the germ of all the types of action found in concrete experience.
We can never be sure that any animal movement, however rudimentary the organism, is a pure action upon presentation. It is possible that we have an instance of such action in the movements of the simplest unicellular organisms, e.g., the amoeba, toward a fragment of food-stuff or away from a drop of acid. The object, if edible, gives rise to a vague idea, vaguely pleas- urable. The rudimentary attention involved is the psychological condition of a movement of the total organism: the amoeba flows towards the fragment, pours itself out, so to speak, in this or that direction. If the object is deleterious, there is a reverse move- ment, a shrinking back of the whole mass of protoplasm.
§ 63. The Nature of Impulsive Action. — We have as- sumed that action began as action upon presentation. Whenever we look introspectively at an action of our own, however, — whenever we try to analyse a concrete action-consciousness, — we find no trace of anything ex- cept action npon representation. The actions which we ourselves perform involve the idea of past movement, a conscious re-presentation of some movement previously performed. The simplest form of action upon representa- tion is impulsive action. A large proportion of the actions of animals which stand low in the scale of development are, so far as we can interpret them, impulsive actions. And there can be no doubt that actions of this type form a part of the sum of movements executed by the higher animals and by man.
Suppose that I am hungry, and see a supply of food. The idea of the food possesses me, holds my attention. At the same time that I have this idea, I have the further ideas of a movement towards the food and of its seizure.
§ 63. The Nature of Imptilsive Action 241 That is to say, the sight of the food brings up in my mind memories of all the organic and other sensations which would be aroused by a real movement towards the food. The attention is now directed, not upon the idea of the food, but upon the idea of the food plus the idea of my own movement. Attention to this pleasurably toned com- pound idea is the psychological condition of actual move- ment: my hand goes out towards the plate, and the sensations which I had imagined are realised. I have the experience of a simple impulsive action.- There is a great difference between this action and action upon presentation. I do not merely attend to the food, and take it; I attend to the food and to an idea of my movement towards it, — and then take it. The impul- sive action presupposes the representation in conscious- ness of a movement formerly made.
But although in psychological analysis the difference between the two actions is so great, for all practical purposes it may be very small. Granted that I have an idea of previous bodily movement, I am not necessarily much better off than I was before. The movement which I remember may be exceedingly roundabout, or may be far more violent and exhausting than the present occasion demands. The mere idea of a movement is not enough: what I need is the idea of the right movement, i.e., of the movement which will take me most quickly and by the most direct road to the food which I see. It is only when the right movement comes to mind at sight of the food that the impulse has reached its full development. How does this development proceed } The idea of movement which comes up when I see the food arises by way of simultaneous association. Food- 242 Voluntary Movement. Analysis of Action idea and the sensations aroused by forward bodily move- ment have been associated in past experience: therefore when the food-idea appears, the sensations aroused by movement tend to appear with it. The question how the impulsive action developes, then, resolves itself into the question: How is it that the idea of the right movement comes to be associated, more firmly than all other possible ideas of movement, to the food-idea?
The answer is, in brief, that the performance of the right movement makes the whole experience more pleas- ant than the performance of any other movement could do. We have seen that the pleasantness of an event, i.e., its hold over the attention, gives its idea a power of con- nection, a grip upon other ideas, which it would not have in its own right (§ 55). Hence the movement which brings pleasure in the greatest degree will be more firmly cemented to the food-idea than will another movement, which brings pleasure in a less degree.
How is the pleasantness produced } Why is it that the right movement brings more pleasure than any other could } In the first place, the idea of the food is pleas- ant; attention to it means a forward, not backward, move- ment. In the second place, this movement is a means to an end, not itself an end. Hence the most pleasant idea of movement will be the idea of a quick and straight movement, a movement which does not involve delay or too great effort. And in the third place, the idea of the result of the movement, the idea of an immediate satis- faction of my hunger, is pleasant; and the satisfaction comes most quickly with the quickest and most direct movement. This idea of the result of the impulsive movement is a factor in the total experience which we § 63. The Nature of Impulsive Action 243 have not mentioned before: it is an idea which must evi- dently come up in consciousness after action upon pre- sentation has made us famihar with the consequences of movement, and an idea whose pleasantness will have a great deal to do with the shaping of the impulsive action. The more vivid the idea of result, the more accurate becomes the representation of the movement. When the impulse has reached its full development, it is sometimes difficult to say, from introspection, whether the ultimate psychological condition of the action is attention to the object (food), or attention to the result of the movement (satiety). It seems that the idea of result tends more and more to replace the idea of the object, as consciousness advances in complexity.
If we put together the results of the last two Sections, we obtain the following scheme of development: — (i) Action upon Presentation. — Food is presented; it is attended to, and found pleasurable; movement towards follows. Or an injurious substance is presented; it is attended to, and found unpleasant; movement away follows.
(2) Action upon Representation. — {a) The undeveloped impulsive action. — Food is presented (pleasant); remembrance of for- ward movement supplements it; movement towards follows. (<^) The developed impulsive action. — Food is presented (pleasant); the idea of satiety supplements it (pleasant); remembrance of direct forward movement (pleasant) supple- ments these ideas; direct movement towards follows. Or an injurious object is presented (unpleasant); the idea of per- sonal safety supplements it (pleasant); remembrance of direct movement away (pleasant) supplements these ideas; direct movement away follows.
We can trace the development of impulsive action in the move- ments of young children. It has been suggested that the more or 244 Voluntary Movement. Analysis of Action less random actions of the newly born infant may be actions upon presentation, actions of the whole organism set up directly, in response to a pleasurable or unpleasurable impression, without any ' idea of movement,' any revival of the organic sensations aroused by previous movement. But it must be remembered that the infant moves in the foetal state, and thus makes acquaint- ance with its organic sensations before birth. Moreover, obser- vation of the ' random ' actions made in the first few days of infancy shows that they can all be classified as more or less per- fecdy developed impulsive or reflex (§ 66) movements; we have, in any case, only to wait a little to see them pass into the fully developed form. Even the movements of the amoeba, referred to in the foregoing Section, may perhaps be impulsive. The movements towards and away may be differently ' sensed'; the food-idea may be supplemented by one ' organic sensation,' and the idea of the deleterious substance by another.
Method. — You may convince yourself of the great difference between action upon presentation and action upon representa- tion, i.e., of the extreme importance of the idea of movement for the regulation and perfecting of action, by the following experiment. Fix the attention steadily and intently upon some idea of bodily movement; say, the rising to open a window. You will find that, as you attend, the impulse to rise grows stronger and stronger, until finally you can overcome it only by an effort, — by the idea that you do not really want the window open, that you are merely making an experiment, etc. If the movement-idea is so powerful in the adult consciousness, with all its complicated mechanism for inhibition, we may imagine what it must be in the mind of the animal or child or savage, where the inhibitory mechanism is very much less developed.
§ 64. The Place of Impulse in Consciousness. — We mean by ' impulse ' the complex of processes which forms the psychological condition of the impulsive movement. This complex is a simultaneous association of the idea of the object, the idea of movement to or from the object, § 64- TJie Place of hiipidse in Consciousness 245 and the idea of the result of the movement, — the whole complex being the object of passive attention. Impulse, as thus understood, is closely related to the two complex processes which we have termed feeling and emotion. The three experiences may be distinguished as follows.
The impulse differs from the feeling in three respects. The feeling contains a single idea or perception; the impulse contains three. Moreover, in the feeling the affection is stronger than any sensation in the complex; in the impulse, the ideas have a very considerable part to play alongside of the affection. There is, further, a dif- ference in the physiological conditions of affective expres- sion and impulsive action, which leads to a difference in psychological experience. The 'expression' of the feel- ing is diffused over the whole body; so far as it is mus- cular, it consists simply in a general strengthening or weakening of the whole muscular system. The expres- sion of the impulse is a definite movement, a definite group of muscular flexions and extensions; and the organic sensations arising from this movement are re- membered, and turned to account for the shaping of future impulsive movements, i.e.y included in future impulses.
The impulse differs from the emotion in two respects. Organic sensations enter into the central feeling, the ' body ' of the primitive emotion after that feeling has taken shape; they are present in the primitive impulse from the very first. Hence although the attention im- plied in the formation of the emotion and the impulse is the same, — passive attention, — there is noticeably more effort in the impulsive than there is in the emotive con- sciousness. And secondly, the organic sensations aroused 246 Voluntary Movement. Ajialysis of Action by emotive movements are far more complex than those which attach to the ideas of object and result in impulse. In the emotion, they proceed from a large number of bodily organs, and from the whole muscular system; in the impulse, from one group of muscles.
It must be noted that the first of the two differences between impulse and emotion can be brought to light only by an appeal to the primitive forms of the two processes. In adult experience, we have no knowledge of two stages of formation in the emotion (§ 57). But the effort-factor present in impulse is a reminder that those two stages did once exist, and that they have no coun- terpart in impulse itself.
§ 65. The Forms of Impulse. — Impulses fall into two great classes: impulses towards, and impulses away from.
Just as we should be able to obtain a satisfactory classi- fication of the emotions if we could determine the inevi- table and typical ' situations ' which an organism must face, so we should be able to classify impulses, if we could determine what ideas of objects inevitably attracted the attention, were uniformly supplemented by the idea of movement, and so gave rise to typical impulsive actions. But the conscious processes given in actual experience are so intertwined and tangled that no one has hitherto suc- ceeded in making out a list of such ideas.
It is customary to classify impulses by the results of impulsive action, i.e., to make a list not of the objects which evoke that action, but of the end or aim of the movement, as it is seen by the outside observer. We saw that emotions might be classified, upon a similar principle, as subjective and objective emotions, the former consisting principally of ideas about the subject experienc- § 65. The Forms of Impidse 247 ing the emotion, the latter of ideas of the situation which aroused it. Regarded from this point of view, impulses fall into two groups: subjective or individual, and objec- tive or social impulses. The result of impulsive action in the first case is to accomplish something for oneself; its result in the second case is to accomplish something for others as well as for oneself.
The most general forms of subjective impulse are the impulses of nutrition (impulse towards) and defence (im- pulse away from). The objective impulses appear at three levels of mental development, as the sexual im- pulses (attraction and repulsion), the parental impulses (affection and exclusion) and the tribal impulses (friend- liness and hostility).
Instances of movement following from these impulses would be the reaching after food in hunger; the clenching of the fist in anger; choosing a mate within a single race or species; the care devoted to one's own offspring and the '■ stepmotherly ' treatment of members of other families; actions due to professional or class bias, to imitation of one's neighbours, etc. All forms of impulse are more clearly shown in the animals than in man.
The close connection between impulse and emotion is brought out by the fact that some of the words used in the text to desig- nate impulses (attraction, affection) have already been used to designate emotions (§§ 58, 60). The words, of course, have different meanings, according as they denote an impulse or an emotion (§ 64); but the necessity of employing one word in two senses adds to the difficulty of classification under both heads. — ■ The clenching of the fist in anger is an expression of impulse, which has become incorporated in an emotive expression. Orig- inally, the movement was the expression of the impulse to strike, and in some cases it still retains this character. It is then a com- plete and final expression, and the sensations set up by it are attended to until it is carried out promptly and effectively. As 248 Voluntary Moveme^tt. Analysis of Action part of the expression of an emotion it is a relic of impulsive action, and the sensations set up by it serve merely to colour the central feeling.
§ 66. Reflex Action. — When the impulsive action has reached its highest development, the idea of movement which supplements the idea of the object is an exact image, a memory photograph, of the movement actually performed. But when this point has been attained, there is no longer any need of an idea of movement at all. The idea has been useful to the organism as shap- ing, guiding, narrowing down the movement actually made; but now that the movement has been guided into precisely the right channels, it may be left to itself. Hence we find that if a particular impulsive action is constantly recurring, the idea of movement, originally contained in the impulse, gradually drops out of con- sciousness. Some one says to us: * There's a spider on the back of your head! ' — and we raise our hand to brush the spider away, i.e., perform a localising move- ment, without any thought of the movement itself.
In this case we have the idea of the object (spider) and the idea of result (brushing the spider away). We have no idea of movement, and we do not pay any attention to the organic sensations aroused by the actual movement. In another instance, we may have but very vague ideas of object and result, and none of the movement. I may be talking interestedly with a friend, and, without any in- terruption of the train of ideas, put my hand to the back of my head. Finding a spider there, I may say: * Ah! I thought I felt something! ' Here I had some vague idea of object and result, but no idea of either that was at all definite.
The process may be continued still further, until all three of the impulse-ideas, those of movement, object and result, as well as the sensations aroused by actual movement, lapse from consciousness. I may make a localising movement, and flick an insect away, without knowing that I am going to move, that I have moved, that the insect had settled on me, or that I have re- moved it. I wink my eyes a hundred times a day, without knowing that I do so. I turn my eyes directly upon anything that catches my attention in the visual field, and so bring the particular object upon the spot of clearest vision, without realising that I am moving my eyes or why I am moving them. And so on.
The first of these three types of action is impulsive action which is just poised, so to speak, at its highest level, and which will very soon begin to lose its con- scious character. The second action is action which stands half-way between impulsive and reflex action. The third is reflex action: action which, originally im- pulsive, has grown so habitual that its pleasure has worn off, and its component ideas and sensations have entirely disappeared from consciousness.
Reflex action, then, is impulsive action which has become a matter of course, and therefore indifferent. It stands to the impulsive action as the indifferent idea stands to the affectively toned idea, or as the states of apathy, composure, etc., stand to emotion. Its conditions are entirely physiological (§44). It has no place in psychology in its own right: it calls for mention simply as an instance of the psychological law of habituation. It cannot, strictly, be termed ' action ': it is a movement which has taken shape from action. We may keep the word ' action ' for it, however, to indicate the fact that it does not stand upon the same footing as the involuntary movements of heart, lungs, etc.
250 Vohuitary Afoveuient. Analysis of Action The physiological conditions of reflex action are simpler than those given for voluntary movement in general (§ 61). The rein- forcing excitations from the frontal lobes, and the consequent effect upon the whole nervous system, have dropped out of the series. We have only a sensory excitation, sensory cell explosion, motor cell explosion, and motor excitation with its consequence of muscular contraction. Moreover, the sensory cell need not be a cortical cell; it may be a cell in some one of the lower nervous An impulsive action may pass over into a reflex during the life- time of an individual. But we inherit the mechanism of most of our reflex actions; the nervous system brings with it a number of ready-made ' reflex-arcs,' i.e., connections of sensory and motor paths. Some of these arcs are perfect at birth; in other cases, a httle time is required for the sensory-motor connection to be- come quite definite (§ 62). The impulses out of which these reflexes have proceeded belong to an earlier period in the hfe- history of the race or species.
§ 6^. Instinctive Action. — The true reflex has neither conscious conditions nor conscious concomitants. There is, now, another form of movement, which is derived, like the reflex, from impulsive action, and which shows many of the characteristics of the reflex, — but which has well- marked conscious concomitants. This is instinctive move- ment.
The conscious condition of impulsive movement is atten- tion to the three ideas of object, movement and result. All these ideas have lapsed from consciousness before movement becomes instinctive, as they have before it becomes reflex. The instinctive movement itself resem- bles the reflex in the certainty and promptness of its performance, and in its serviceableness to the organism. It differs from the reflex only in its greater complexity: it is more like a series of reflexes. But — and this is the important point — the organic sensations aroused by reflex movement are entirely neglected; the organic sen- sations aroused by the instinctive movement are attended to, and are highly pleasurable.
Here, then, is the difficulty of the problem which in- stinctive movement presents to the psychologist: How are we to reconcile the fact that the movement has become mechanical and reflex-like, by frequent repeti- tion, with the other fact that the affection has not worn off the sensations which accompany it?
First let us be sure of the facts. We shall get our best illustra- tions of instinctive movements from animal psychology. ( i ) There is no idea of the result of instinctive movement. — To prove this we may take the instance of the second year's bird which builds the nest pecuhar to its species, or of the caterpillar which spins the comphcated cocoon of its species. The animals have no pat- tern to go by: there can be no idea of the completed nest or of the finished cocoon. (2) There is no idea of the object to or from which movement is to be made. — The newly hatched chick pecks at a newspaper under its feet, and ducks its head and runs when a pigeon's wing flickers over the barn-yard. We say: ' It takes the printed letters for grains ' and ' It thought it saw a hawk.' But it never has seen either grains or hawks. Evidently, then, it can have no idea of the object to or from which it is moving. The movement is touched off, reflexly, by the sensory stimulus, just as is the really reflex movement of the hand, whereby an insect is flicked away from the coat upon which it has settled. (3) There is no idea of the movement to be made. — The cage-reared mi- grant beats its wings against its cage at the approach of winter, in its endeavour to fly south. It never has flown south: it can have no mental representation of organic sensations which have never been presented in its consciousness. (4) The sensations aroused by instinctive movements are pleasant. — This is borne out by introspection, and follows from such instances as that just 252 Voluntary Movement. Analysis of Action given, where the pleasantness of the organic sensations aroused by instinctive movement is strong enough to overcome the unpleas- antness of bruised breast and wings. We see the same thing in the fighting instinct developed among many animals during the period of courtship. The consequences of the combat are often unpleasant; but the instinctive movements still continue, their pleasantness overcoming the unpleasantness.
To reconcile the two facts we must have recourse to biology. There are some things which the organism cannot afford to neglect, which it must attend to, if it is to survive {cf. § 38). The bodily changes set up by instinctive movement must not be neglected. The move- ment is of the greatest importance to the organism; and it is too complicated to become altogether unconscious, to be turned over entirely to the lower nervous centres for regulation.
To this statement we may add the considerations brought for- ward with regard to the organic sensations in § 56. If we go back to the sources of the reflex and instinctive actions, we see that the organic sensations which enter into the instinctive con- sciousness would be more intensive than those aroused by the reflex. It is natural, then, that their aff*ective tone should not wear off. Organic sensations remain pleasant or unpleasant, if they are at all intensive; their stimuli put them in intimate rela- tion to the total state of the nervous system. Moreover, instinct- ive movement, though it has become mechanised in the course of organic evolution, does not occur so continually, in the life of the animal, as does reflex movement. It occurs at critical periods, which are so far the same for all members of a species that mechanisation is useful, but which, just because they are critical, are separated by intervals of greater or less duration. In these intervals other types of action suffice for the needs of the organism.
The true instinctive movement has no conscious con- dition. But it is clear that when a certain instinctive movement has been a few times performed, every later repetition of it will have definite conscious antecedents. Human instinctive movement, performed in adult life, always has a conscious condition, consisting of the ideas of object, result and movement. At this point we have instinctive action. The ' instinct ' — that is, the conscious condition of the instinctive movement — is formally indis- tinguishable from the 'impulse': each consists of attention to the same three ideas. The sole introspective difference between instinctive and impulsive action is the greater intensity and larger number of the organic sensations which accompany the instinctive movement. We must add to this, however, a difference brought out by com- parative introspection: the difference that instinctive ac- tion is often performed, in obedience to biological laws, in the face of opposing impulses.
We find instinctive action even in animals. Thus when a bird comes to build its nest in the third year, it must have some mem- ory of the pattern of last year, of the movements of nest-building, and of the results which followed. These three ideas, all pleasant, form the conscious condition of the instinctive actions of this third year.
As instances of human instinctive action we may take hunting and competition. When a man goes out duck-shooting, he has an idea of his object, of his movements and of the result at which the movements aim. Now he may think, on reflection, that the object is insignificant, that the movements will be made under very unpleasant circumstances, and that the result is problemati- cal: yet he goes, and enjoys himself. He goes, in obedience to the instinct of pursuit; he enjoys himself, because instinctive movements are pleasant.
In a case like this, we clearly see the instinctive nature of the action. The antecedent ideas in consciousness are unpleasant: yet a movement towards follows them. The nervous mechanism 254 Vohmtary Movement. Analysis of Acttofz works automatically. Had the conscious antecedent been an impulse, the following movement would have been movement away. In the case of rivalry (emulation, competition) there is no such clear difference. The action might be regarded as impul- sive, were it not that we can trace its development from the fight- ing instincts of the lower animals.
It is important to grasp the fact that the ' instinct ' comes later than the ' instinctive ' movement. We never have impulsive action without impulse (the conscious condition). The first instinctive movements, on the contrary, are made without any conscious con- dition, without any preceding ' instinct' The instinct takes shape when we have had some experience of instinctive movements and their results: only after this experience do we get the full process, ' instinctive action.' This fact alone would be enough to differen- tiate the two forms of action, impulsive and instinctive, even if introspection of the adult consciousness showed no difference at all between the two experiences.
No satisfactory list of human instincts can be made out. Be- sides the two mentioned, the instincts of pursuit and of rivalry, we may instance the instinct of speech, which shows itself even in deaf- mutes, and which is normally reinforced by the impulse to imita- tion; the play-instinct, which in animals always takes the form of mimic combats; the instinct of inquisitiveness, which perhaps had its origin in apprehension of the unknown {cf. § 70); and the acquisitive instinct, which probably arose under the biological necessity of storing up a supply of food for the winter months. _, § 6^. Selective, Volitional and Automatic Action. — Im- pulsive and instinctive actions are possible only so long as the attention to their antecedent ideas remains passive. Action which is conditioned by active attention is termed selective or volitional action.
(i) Selective action arises when we have in conscious- ness the materials of two different impulses, — when two § 68. Selective, Volitional, Automatic Action 255