154 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, m being the case, is there not much to be said for the hypothesis of a conscious force or free will, which, subject to the action of time and storing up dura tion, may thereby escape the law of the conserva tion of energy?
In truth, it is not a wish to meet the requirements of positive science, but rather a psychological me idea of mistake which has caused this abstract ithye oTSet- principle of mechanics to be set up as a on i0codneSdn universal law. As we are not accustomed creeteeeduraS to observe ourselves directly, but per- tfme. abstract ceive ourselves through forms borrowed from the external world, we are led to believe that real duration, the duration lived by consciousness, is the same as the duration which glides over4he inert atoms without penetrating and altering them. Hence it is that we do not see any absurd ity in putting things back in their place after a lapse of time, in supposing the same motives acting afresh on the same persons, and in conclud ing that these causes would again produce the same effect. That such an hypothesis has no real meaning is what we shall prove later on. For the present let us simply show that, if once we enter upon this path, we are of course led to set up the principle of the conservation of energy as a universal law. For we have thereby got rid of just that difference between the outer and the inner world which a close examination shows to be the main one: we have identified true duration with apparent duration. After this it would be absurd CHAP, m PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERMINISM 155 to consider time, even our time, as a cause of gain or loss, as a concrete reality, or a force in its own way. Thus, while we ought only to say (if we kept aloof from all presuppositions concerning free will) that the law of the conservation of energy governs physical phenomena and may, one day, be extended to all phenomena if psychological facts also prove favourable to it, we go far beyond this, and, under the influence of a metaphysical prepossession, we lay down the principle of the conservation of energy as a law which should govern all phenomena whatever, or must be sup posed to do so until psychological facts have actually spoken against it. Science, properly so called, has therefore nothing to do with all this. We are simply confronted with a confusion between concrete duration and abstract time, two very different things. In a word, the so-called physical determinism is reducible at bottom to a psycho logical determinism, and it is this latter doctrine, as we hinted at first, that we have to examine.
Psychological determinism, in its latest and most precise shape, implies an associationist Psychological conception of mind. The existing state ^ consciousness is first thought of as of necessitated by the preceding states, but min(L it is soon realized that this cannot be a geometrical necessity, such as that which con nects a resultant, for example, with its components. For between successive conscious states there TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, in exists a difference of quality which will always frustrate any attempt to deduce any one of them a priori from its predecessors. So experience is appealed to, with the object of showing that the transition from one psychic state to another can always be explained by some simple reason, the second obeying as it were the call of the first. Experience really does show this: and, as for our selves, we shall willingly admit that there always is some relation between the existing state of consciousness and any new state to which consciousness passes. But is this relation, which explains the transition, the cause of it?
May we here give an account of what we have personally observed? In resuming a conversation The series of which had been interrupted for a few associations may be merely moments we have happened to notice an ex pott facto.
attempt to that both we ourselves and our friend account lor a..
new idea. were thinking of some new object at the same time. — The reason is, it will be said, that each has followed up for his own part the natural development of the idea at which the conversation had stopped: the same series of associations has been formed on both sides. — No doubt this inter pretation holds good in a fairly large number of cases; careful inquiry, however, has led us to an unexpected result. It is a fact that the two speakers do connect the new subject of conversa tion with the former one: they will even point out the intervening ideas; but, curiously enough, CHAP, in PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERMINISM 157 they will not always connect the new idea, which they have both reached, with the same point of the preceding conversation, and the two series of intervening associations may be quite different. What are we to conclude from this, if not that this common idea is due to an unknown cause — per haps to some physical influence — and that, in order to justify its emergence, it has called forth a series of antecedents which explain it and which seem to be its cause, but are really its effect?
When a patient carries out at the appointed time the suggestion received in the hypnotic state, the act which he performs is brought from hypnotic about, according to him, by the precediuggestion...A7 ing series of his conscious states. Yet these states are really effects, and not causes: it was necessary that the act should take place; it was also necessary that the patient should explain it to himself; and it is the future act which determined, by a kind of attraction, the whole series of psychic states of which it is to be the natural consequence. The determinists will seize on this argument: it proves as a matter of fact that we are sometimes irresistibly subject to another's will. But does it not also show us how our own will is capable of willing for willing* s sake, and of then leaving the act which has been performed to be explained by antecedents of which it has really been the cause?
If we question ourselves carefully, we shall see CHAP. Ill 158 TIME AND FREE WILL that we sometimes weigh motives and deliberate over them, when our mind is already made tromdeiibera- up. An inner voice, hardly perceivable, whispers: " Why this deliberation? You know the result and you are quite certain of what you are going to do." But no matter! it seems that we make a point of safe-guarding the principle of mechanism and of conforming to the laws of the association of ideas. The abrupt inter vention of the will is a kind of coup d'ttat which our mind foresees and which it tries to legitimate beforehand by a formal deliberation. True, it could be asked whether the will, even when it wills for willing's sake, does not obey some decisive reason, and whether willing for willing's sake is free willing. We shall not insist on this point for the moment. It will be enough for us to have shown that, even when adopt ing the point of view of associationism, it is difficult to maintain that an act is absolutely determined by its motive and our conscious states by one another. Beneath these deceptive appear ances a more attentive psychology sometimes reveals to us effects which precede their causes, and phenomena of psychic attraction which elude the known laws of the association of ideas. But the time has come to ask whether the very point of view which associationism adopts does not involve a defective conception of the self and of the multiplicity of conscious states.
Associationist determinism represents the self as CHAP, m PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERMINISM 159 a collection of psychic states, the strongest of Association- which exerts a prevailing influence and deTeS1VceoSn- carries the others with it. This doctrine ceptwr IB ^^ sharply distinguishes co-existing psychic phenomena from one another. " I could have abstained from murder," says Stuart Mill, " if my aversion to the crime and my dread of its consequences had been weaker than the temptation which impelled me to commit it."1 And a little further on: " His desire to do right and his aversion to doing wrong are strong enough to overcome...any other desire or aversion which may conflict with them." 2 Thus desire, aversion, fear, temptation are here presented as distinct things which there is no inconvenience in naming separately. Even when he connects these states with the self which experiences them, the English philosopher still insists on setting up clear-cut distinctions: " The conflict is between me and myself; between (for instance) me desiring a pleasure and me dreading self-reproach." 3 Bain, for his part, devotes a whole chapter to the " Con flict of Motives." 4 In it he balances pleasures and pains as so many terms to which one might attribute, at least by abstraction, an existence of their own. Note that the opponents of determin ism agree to follow it into this field. They too speak of associations of ideas and conflicts of 4 The Emotions and the Will, Chap. vi.
TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, m motives, and one of the ablest of these philosophers, Alfred Fouillee, goes so far as to make the idea of freedom itself a motive capable of counterbalan cing others.1 Here, however, lies the danger. Both parties commit themselves to a confusion which arises from language, and which is due to the fact that language is not meant to convey all the delicate shades of inner states.
I rise, for example, to open the window, and I have hardly stood up before I forget what I had to do. — All right, it will be said; you ous tendency have associated two ideas, that or an aided by Ian-..,,.,,.
gnage. nius- end to be attained and that ot a move ment to be accomplished: one of the ideas has vanished and only the idea of the move ment remains. — However, I do not sit down again; I have a confused feeling that something remains to be done. This particular standing still, therefore, is not the same as any other standing still; in the position which I take up the act to be performed is as it were prefigured, so that I have only to keep this position, to study it, or rather to feel it intimately, in order to recover the idea which had vanished for a moment. Hence, this idea must have tinged with a certain particular colouring the mental image of the intended movement and the position taken up, and this colouring, without doubt, would not have been the same if the end to be attained had been different. Nevertheless 1 Fouillee, La Liberte et le Deter minisme.
CHAP, m PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERMINISM ( l6l language would have still expressed the move ment and the position in the same way; and associationism would have distinguished the two cases by saying that with the idea of the same movement there was associated this time the idea of a new end: as if the mere newness of the end to be attained did not alter in some degree the idea of the movement to be performed, even though the movement itself remained the same! We should thus say, not that the image of a certain Jt position can be connected in consciousness with images of different ends to be attained, but rather that positions geometrically identical outside look different to consciousness from the, inside, accords ing to the end contemplated. ^The mistake of associationism is that it first did away with the qualitative element in the act to be pefrormed and retained only the geometrical and impersonal element: with the idea of this act, thus rendered colourless, it was then necessary to associate some specific difference to distinguish it from many other acts. But this association is the work of the associationist philosopher who is studying my mind, rather than of my mind itself.
I smell a rose and immediately confused recol lections of childhood come back to my memory. illustration ^n truth, these recollections have not atio^s"»aso0ici" been called up by the perfume of the smeii. rose. i breathe them in with the very scent; it means all that to me. To others it will smell differently. — It is always the same scent, M TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, m you will say, but associated with different ideas. — I am quite willing that you should express your self in this way; but do not forget that you have first removed the personal element from the differ ent impressions which the rose makes on each one of us; you have retained only the objective aspect, that part of the scent of the rose which is public property and thereby belongs to space. Only thus was it possible to give a name to the perfume! You then found it necessary, in order fo distinguish our personal impressions from one another, to add specific characteristics to the general idea of rose-scent. And you now say that our different impressions, our personal impres sions, result from the fact that we associate differ ent recollections with rose-scent. But the asso ciation of which you speak hardly exists except for you, and as a method of explanation. It is in this way that, by setting side by side certain letters of an alphabet common to a number of known languages, we may imitate fairly well such and such a characteristic sound belonging to a new one; but not with any of these letters, nor with all of them, has the sound itself been built up. We are thus brought back to the distinction which we set up above between the multiplicity Association- °f juxtaposition and that of fusion or interpenetration. Such and such a feelinS> sucn and sucn an idea> contains an indefinite plurality of conscious states: oi fusion. but the piurality ^11 not be observed CHAP, in PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERMINISM unless it is, as it were, spread out in this homogene ous medium which some call duration, but which is in reality space. We shall then perceive terms external to one another, and these terms will no longer be the states of consciousness themselves, but their symbols, or, speaking more exactly, the words which express thpim1 There is, as we have pointed out, a close connexion between the faculty of conceiving a homogeneous medium, such as space, and that of thinking by means of general ideas. As soon as we try to give an account of a conscious state, to analyse it, this state, which is above all personal, will be resolved into imper sonal elements external to one another, each of which calls up the idea of a genus and is expressed by a word. But because our reason, equipped with the idea of space and the power of creating symbols, draws these multiple elements out of the whole, it does not follow that they were con tained in it. For within the whole they did not occupy space and did not care to express them selves by means of symbols; they permeated and melted into one another. Associationism thus makes the mistake of constantly replacing the concrete phenomenon which takes place in the mind by the artificial reconstruction of it given by philosophy, and of thus confusing the explanation of the fact with the fact itself. We shall perceive this more clearly as we consider deeper and more comprehensive psychic states. The self comes into contact with the external X64 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, m world at its surface; and as this surface retains the imprint of objects, the self will associate by contiguity terms which it deepe?aTtates has perceived in juxtaposition: it is connexions of this kind, connexions of quite simple and so to speak impersonal sensa tions, that the associationist theory fits. But, just in proportion as we dig below the surface and get down to the real self, do its states of conscious ness cease to stand in juxtaposition and begin to permeate and melt into one another, and each to be tinged with the colouring of all the others. Thus each of us has his own way of loving and hating; and this love or this hatred reflects his whole personality. Language, however, denotes these states by the same words in every case: so that it has been able to fix only the objective and I impersonal aspect of love, hate, and the thousand r emotions which stir the soul. We estimate the talent of a novelist by the power with which he lifts out of the common domain, to which language had thus brought them down, feelings and ideas to which he strives to restore, by adding detail to detail, their original and living individuality. But just as we can go on inserting points between two positions of a moving body without ever filling up the space traversed, in the same way, by the mere fact that we associate states with states and that these states are set side by side instead of permeating one another, we fail to translate completely what our soul experiences: there CHAP, ni THE FREE ACT 165 is no common measure between mind and lan guage.
Therefore, it is only an inaccurate psychology, misled by language, which will show us the soul Theseiiisnotdetermined by sympathy, aversion, or So<S5555tfl nate as tnough by so many forces lorn8' is FseT Pressm§ upon it. These feelings, pro- Sfnsiof ' de" v^ded that they go deep enough, each grees,andmay make up the whole soul, since the whole be curtailed by be curtailed by education. content of the soul is reflected in each of them. /To say that the soul is determined under the influence of any one of these feelings is thus to recognize that it is self-determined. ^)The associationist reduces the self to an aggregate of conscious states: sensations, feelings, and ideas. But if he sees in these various states no more than is expressed in their name, if he retains only their impersonal aspect, he may set them side by side for ever without getting anything but a phantom self, the—Shadow of the ego projecting itsel|_intospace. If, on the contrary, he takes these psychic states with the particular colouring which they assume in the case of a definite person, and which comes to each of them by reflection from all the others, then there is no need to asso ciate a number of conscious states in order to rebuild the person, for the whole personality is in a single one of them, provided that we know how to choose it. And the outward manifestation of this inner state will be just what is called a free act. since the self alone will have been the author l66 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, in of it, and since it will express the whole of the self. Freedom, thus understood, is not absolute, as a radically libertarian philosophy would have it; it admits of degrees. For it is by no means the case that all conscious states blend with one an other as raindrops with the water of a lake. The self, in so far as it has to do with a homogeneous space, develops on a kind of surface, and on this surface independent growths may form and float. Thus a suggestion received in the hypnotic state is not incorporated in the mass of conscious states, but, endowed with a life of its own, it will usurp the whole personality when its time comes. A violent anger roused by some accidental circum stance, an hereditary vice suddenly emerging from the obscure depths of the organism to the surface of consciousness, will act almost like a hypnotic suggestion. Alongside these independ ent elements there may be found more complex series, the terms of which do permeate one another, but which never succeed in blending perfectly with the whole mass of the self. Such is the system of feelings and ideas which are the result of an education not properly assimilated, an education which appeals to the memory rather than to the judgment. Here will be found, within the fundamental self, a parasitic self which con tinually encroaches upon the other. Many live this kind of life, and die without having known true freedom. But suggestion would become persuasion if the entire self assimilated it; pas- CHAP, in THE FREE ACT 167 sion, even sudden passion, would no longer bear the stamp of fatality if the whole history of the person were reflected in it, as in the indignation of Alceste; 1 and the most authoritative education would not curtail any of our freedom if it only imparted to us ideas and feelings capable of impreg nating the whole soul. It is the whole soul, in fact, which gives rise to the free decision: and the act will be so much the freer the more the dynamic series with which it is connected tends to be the fundamental self.
Thus understood, free acts are exceptional, even on the part of those who are most given to our every-day controlling and reasoning out what they "ra AS- do- Jt nas been pointed out that we gmtnoriM» generally perceive our own self by JS reanySS refraction through space, that our con- SefflaSen- scious states crystallize into words, and tai sen ^at our living and concrete self thus gets covered with an outer crust of clean-cut psychic states, which are separated from one another and consequently fixed. We added that, for the convenience of language and the promotion of social relations, we have everything to gain by not breaking through this crust and by assuming it to give an exact outline of the form of the object which it covers. It should now be added that our daily actions are called forth not so much by our feelings themselves, which are constantly 1 In Moliere's comedy Le Misanthrope, (Tr.).
TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, m changing, as by the unchanging images with which these feelings are bound up. In the morning, when the hour strikes at which I am accustomed to rise, I might receive this impression wv oXy TJI tyx?,, as Plato says; I might let it blend with the confused mass of impressions which fill my mind; perhaps in that case it would not determine me to act. But generally this impression, instead of disturbing my whole consciousness like a stone which falls into the water of a pond, merely stirs up an idea which is, so to speak, solidified on the surface, the idea of rising and attending to my usual occupations. This impression and this idea have in the end become tied up with one another, so that the act follows the impression without the self interfering with it. In this in stance I am a conscious automaton, and I am so because I have everything to gain by being so. It will be found that the majority of our daily v actions are performed in this way and that, owing to the solidification in memory of such and such sensations, feelings, or ideas, impressions from the outside call forth movements on our part which, though conscious and even intelligent, have many points of resemblance with reflex acts. It is to these acts, which are very numerous but for the most part insignificant, that the associa- tionist theory is applicable. They are, taken all together, the substratum of our free activity, and with respect to this activity they play the same part as our organic functions in relation to the CHAP, m THE FREE ACT 169