Consciousness and Will

But the thinker who desires to get help in the practice of his art from the science of psychology should not be content to avoid the hindrances which arise from the hasty generalizations of some modern psychologists. He should also, I believe, try to rid himself of that “commonsense” notion of his conscious self as a completely integrated unity which he will have formed before he ever heard that a science of psychology exists. Mr. Harry Vardon, when he is practising a new grip, does not, unless he has been reading MacDougall’s Social Psychology or the Plebs text-book, believe that his instincts and his intelligence have to each other the simple relation of power and machine. He finds that he is not successful unless he recognizes more or less clearly that his hands, wrists, eyes, nerves, feelings, and ideas all have “power” of their own; and that, if he is to achieve that measure of harmonious organic co-operation on which excellence in golf depends, he must act on the assumption that in that respect he can only hope to improve an imperfect tendency towards unification. But he will nevertheless assume that he himself, the essential Harry, the person who wills to improve his grip, and is conscious that he wills it, the person who looks out every morning through the eyes in his shaving mirror, is a simple unity.

That assumption will not hurt Mr. Vardon’s golf; but the professed thinker, if he is to control some of the most important elements in his intellectual processes, must so far get behind his own commonsense as to substitute an explicit conception of his conscious self as an imperfect and improvable tendency towards unity for the tacit assumption that his conscious self is an already completed unity. In order to do so, he should begin by forcing himself to realize the existence of an unbroken series of grades from unconsciousness up to the highest level of consciousness which man has yet reached. We can, for instance, watch the growth and decay in our own lives of our own personal consciousness. Memory seems to us to be an essential element in consciousness, and if the consciousness of any one moment is not joined to the consciousness of the following and preceding moments, we can hardly conceive of it as consciousness at all. Yet our memory of consciousness goes back, perhaps, only to the end of our third year; and if we watch a laughing child of one year old, we cannot help believing that vivid consciousness must there exist without continuous memory. Nor can we draw a line at any point between consciousness at the age of one, and consciousness or quasi-consciousness immediately after, or even immediately before birth, or fix a point in the growth of the human embryo where potential quasi-consciousness turns into actual quasi-consciousness. Nor, in the non-human world, can we draw a line between the apparently intense consciousness of a fox terrier or a lark, and the quasi-consciousness of a newly-born puppy or of a fish or worm. At the end of life, we can draw no line between the second childhood of extreme old age, the quasi-consciousness of delirium, the unconsciousness of coma or of functional death, and the non-consciousness of irrevocable death.: At least once every twenty-four hours we pass through all the grades from consciousness through foreconsciousness to unconsciousness while going to sleep, and back again while waking up. We are further becoming aware that consciousness not only may be graded on a single series from complete unconsciousness to the highest grade of consciousness yet reached, but also may exist in forms parallel to that series. Hypnotists and psychiatrists have, for instance, proved that in the same person there may be, either successively or simultaneously, two or more “dissociated consciousnesses,” or “co-consciousnesses.”

Consciousness, indeed, shows all the signs of having reached, as yet, only an early, imperfect, and confused stage in its evolution. The distribution, for instance, of consciousness over the physiological and psychological events which make up our daily life is strangely arbitrary. Every conscious event can have analogues beneath the level of consciousness. We can unconsciously, or foreconsciously, or co-consciously, experience events which, if they were fully conscious, we should call sensations, or perceptions, or impulses, or thoughts; and in every grade of consciousness we can move our limbs, or compose poems, or discover mathematical solutions. We are, as a rule, unaware of this fact, because we either do not observe or soon forget all mental events outside the limits of full consciousness. In the case of mental events which are so far removed from full consciousness as to be called “unconscious,’ we can only observe them by hypnotism, “free association,’ or some other method of tapping the unconscious memory after the mental event has occurred. In the case of less complete defect of consciousness, we can sometimes observe a foreconscious event while it is going on. In explaining how we can do this, psychologists find it convenient to use terms drawn from the facts of eyesight. The “field of vision” of our eyes consists of a small circle of full or ‘focal’ vision, surrounded by an irregular area of “peripheral” vision, which is increasingly vague and imperfect as the limit of vision is neared. We are usually unaware of the existence of our peripheral vision, because as soon as anything interesting presents itself there we have a strong natural tendency to turn the focus of vision in its direction. We can, however, by a rather severe effort, inhibit that tendency, and so observe objects in our peripheral field of vision. Using these terms, we can say that one reason why we tend to ignore the mental events in our “peripheral” consciousness is that we have a strong tendency to bring them into “focal” consciousness as soon as they are interesting to us, but that we can sometimes by a severe effort keep them in the periphery of consciousness, and there observe them.

Closely allied to the problem of our working conception of consciousness is the problem of our working conception of will. Just as consciousness shades imperceptibly from full consciousness through foreconsciousness to the apparent non-consciousness of the simplest animal behaviour, and from unified consciousness to completely or partially dissociated “co-consciousness,” so full volition shades imperceptibly, through what I may call “fore-volition,” to the apparent non-volition or automatism of the simplest animal behaviour; and, on another line of gradation, from unified volition to that dissociated volition which I may call “co-volition.” It is, indeed, a delicate question of verbal definition both at what point we shall cease to give the name ‘will’ to the less continuous and less unified forms of conscious conation (whether we shall, for instance, say that an excited dog wills to dig at a rabbit-hole, or a hungry infant wills to scream), and at what point in an equally imperceptible gradation we shall distinguish between conscious conation itself and the mere “urge” of the simplest forms of protozoal and cellular life. Even the trained, comparatively unified, and continuous will of an educated civilized man shares that quality of incompleteness and arbitrariness which appears in the analysis both of consciousness, and of the co-ordination (which I discussed in Chapter I) of all the factors of organic life. An unconscious desire may, for instance, mask itself as a conscious will, whose character gives us little or no hint of the underlying process. And an equal arbitrariness characterizes the limits of the control of our will over our external and internal behaviour. If we decide to perform such a bodily act as taking up a book, or walking in this or that direction, we do so, if we are in good health, with such easy and complete control that the will to act and the act itself almost seem to be the same event. We can with equally complete control direct and focus our sight, or move our tongue. Few people can, however, by the most intense effort of will, influence appreciably the rate of their pulse, or the process of digestion, or the functions of their thyroid, or suprarenal, or even lachrymal glands; and in some cases the effort of will is a positive hindrance to the production of the desired events.’

The same is true of those of our activities which, without dogmatizing as to the ultimate relation between body and mind, we may call “mental.” The mental process of attention is, for instance, like the related bodily act of eye-focussing, very completely controllable by our will; and, indeed, the development of the will itself may, on its physiological side, have been closely related to the development of attention. On the other hand, our feelings are very little under the control of our will. We cannot by a direct effort of will make sure of feeling happy, or sorry, or angry, or grateful, at any given moment, or in any particular situation. It is easy for us, again, to learn voluntarily “by heart,’ while making repeated acts of attention combined with the formation of silent speech-images; and we can often by a single effort of will remember a name which we have forgotten, or find the answer to a simple problem. But the mental processes which constitute the higher forms of thought, and which lead to the formation of new and useful ideas or decisions by distant and unaccustomed links of association, are very imperfectly controllable by any direct effort of will. The most perfectly trained scientist or poet can no more be sure that he will be able to make his mind produce the solution of a complex problem, or a new poetical image or cadence, or a really original sonnet on the death of a monarch or a president, than can the most perfectly trained clergyman be sure that he will feel really sad at Tuesday’s funeral or really joyful at Thursday’s wedding. It is this fact which leads to such pessimistic statements about the impossibility of improving thought by conscious art as that which I have already quoted from Pillsbury.[1] If our will is unable to control the more important processes of thought, an art of thought cannot exist.

This was the problem which constantly tormented Plato. The whole universe was to Plato only intelligible if it was seen as an imperfect expression of a divine moral idea; and Plato’s favourite illustration of moral conduct was the voluntary subordination of the craftsman’s skill to the craftsman’s conscious purpose. But conscious purpose seemed to Plato to have surprisingly little connection with the production of poetry, or with the other highest achievements of the human mind. Plato himself was a great poet, with ample personal experience of poetic inspiration; and he lived in Athens at the close of the greatest poetic outburst that the world has ever seen. He was also, as far as his love for truth would allow him, a religious conservative, who hoped to see a moral direction for the distracted city-states of Greece develop out of the trance-utterances of the Delphic oracle. But neither the Athenian poets nor the Delphic priestess (who, when awakened from her trance, might be a very uninteresting person) could, he found, give any account, in terms of conscious volition, of the processes by which their ideas came to them. In the Republic Plato tried to solve the resulting practical problem by forbidding, throughout his ideal state, all poetry except “hymns to the gods and panegyrics on good men.” In the Phædrus, he put forward a half-serious, half-ironical theory that creative thought was a kind of madness, sent upon men by the gods in accordance with some purpose of which the gods and not men were conscious. The Greek words for insanity and inspiration (maniké and mantiké) were, he suggested, derived from the same root. “We Greeks,” he said, “owe our greatest blessings to heaven-sent madness. For the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona have in their moments of madness done great and glorious service to the men and cities of Greece, but little or none in their sober mood.” There is a deeper irony in his description of the “madness inspired by the Muses,” “which seizes upon the tender and virgin soul” of the poet, and distinguishes him from that industrious apprentice to the art of letters, whom Plato the poet, in spite of the theories of Plato the moralist, cannot help despising. “He who having no touch of the Muses’ madness in his soul comes to the door, and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art, he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.”

Indeed, throughout the whole phenomena of consciousness, will, and life, we see the same puzzling tendency towards unity, limited by the same kinds of imperfection. This fact is apt to make not only a nonphysiologist like myself, but some of the best modern physiologists wonder whether physiology may not ultimately give us a working conception of consciousness, will, and life as being the same thing. Professor Julian Huxley, for instance, expresses his belief “that something of the same general nature as mind in ourselves * Phædrus, 244. See also F. C. Prescott, The Poetic Mind (1922), p. 294. is inherent in all life, something standing in the same relation to living matter in general as our minds do to the particular living matter of our brains” (Essays of a Biologist, 1923, p. 242). An unbridged gulf still, it is true, exists between our conceptions of life and non-life, of the behaviour of the atoms that are building up the most complex crystal, and of those which are building up, from its original germ, the simplest living cell. But there seems to be a tendency (strengthened by recent work on atomic structure and movement) to pass over that gap, not by extending, as Loeb and Watson have done, our conceptions of non-life to life, but by extending our conceptions of life to non-life. Professor J. S. Haldane, for instance, writing as a physiologist, says “it is at least evident that the extension of biological conceptions to the whole of nature may be much nearer than seemed conceivable a few years ago” (Mechanism, Life and Personality, 1921, p. 101); ‘We cannot resolve life into mechanism, but behind what we at present interpret as physical and chemical mechanism life may be hidden for all we yet know” (Mechanism, Life and Personality, p. 143); and “That a meeting-point between biology and physical science may at some time be found there is no reason for doubting. But we may confidently predict that if that meeting-point is found, and one of the two sciences is swallowed up, that one will not be biology” (The New Physiology, 1919, p. 19). Professor A. S. Eddington, again, wrote as a mathematical physicist in 1920 that “all through the physical world runs that unknown content, which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness” (Space, Time and Gravitation, p. 200). And, in the same way, it is becoming increasingly difficult for a psychologist to maintain the distinction between his conceptions of “body” and of “mind.” If we are compelled by thousands of years of tradition still to use the old words, we must at least say with Dr. Henry Head that “mind and body habitually respond together to external or internal events,” and with Watson, “a whole man thinks with his whole body in each and every part.” But I myself find that the nearer I get to the statement that body and mind are two aspects of one life, the greater is my sense of reality. And Donne comes very near that statement in the magnificent lines in which he describes a blushing girl:

“Her pure and eloquent blood

Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought

That one might almost say her body thought.”

Notes

1In this case, as in the case of most graded psychological and biological facts, we are hindered in thinking or writing clearly by the defects of our vocabulary. We have hardly any words expressing grades in consciousness. All that psychologists have yet done is to name two extremes, “consciousness” and “unconsciousness,” and to insert between them a single vaguely conceived intermediate grade called “subconsciousness,” or (in Freudian language) “foreconsciousness.” 2 One may be helped to avoid the “common-sense” assumption that consciousness is necessarily absolute and necessarily individual by trying to imagine other kinds of consciousness than our own, say, in the temperate latitudes of the planet Mars. There may there, perhaps, be acres or square miles of confluent protoplasm, in which consciousness exists, but is no more permanently individualized than are the wave-shapes of the sea or the life-shapes in the Buddhist universe.

1See e.g., Baudouin, Autosuggestion (2nd English edition, 1924), p. 37: “In a word, the more we wish, the less are we able.”

1 See above, p. 29.

1 Republic, p. 607.

? Phædrus, 245.

* Oxford Psychological Congress, 1923, p. 180. ” British Journal of Psychology, Oct., 1920, p. 88. ° An Anatomy of the World, line 244—Donne’s Poems (Bullen, Vol. II, p. 135).