LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
THE 
 
 DISEASES OF THE WILL 
 
 / 
 
 TH. RIBOT 
 
 PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE AND EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY IN 
 THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE 
 
 AUTHORISED TRANSLATION FROM THE EIGHTH FRENCH EDITION 
 
 MERWIN-MARIE SNELL 
 
 APR30 \894*/: 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 lliK (JPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 1894 
 
 
 K- 
 

 ^^(^' 
 
 K*^ 
 
 Translation Copyrighted by 
 
 The Open Court Publishing Co. 
 
 Chicago, III., 1894. 
 
^ 
 
 7 ti^eynj ^^AVf^ 
 
 f- 
 
 
 
 trn 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Statement of the question.— On the will as impulsive power.— 
 On the will as inhibitory power.— Role of the individual 
 character. — On choice ; its nature i 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL. I. DEFECT OF IMPULSE. 
 
 Division of the diseases of the will.— On abulia, or incapacity 
 for willing: exampleof Thomas DeQuincy.— Case reported 
 by Billod.— Probable causes of this state.— Two hypoth- 
 eses : weakness of impulse, alteration of motor images ; 
 comparison with psychic paralyses.— Analogous states: 
 agoraphobia ; doubting madness ; cases which border on 
 extinction —Incapacity for effort. Its two forms.— Where 
 is its source? 26 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL. II. EXCESS OF IMPULSE. 
 Sudden and unconscious impulses.— Irresistible impulses with 
 consciousness.— Imperceptible transition from the healthy 
 to the morbid state : fixed ideas.— Dislocation of the will.— 
 Its probable causes. — Impairments by intoxication, by 
 cerebral lesion 54 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 IMPAIRMENTS OF VOLUNTARY ATTENTION. 
 
 Intellectual power and volitional impotence. — Coleridge : his 
 portrait by Carlyle.— Two forms of impairment— Nature 
 of the attention. It has its source in the feelings.— How 
 it is maintained 7^ 
 
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 THE REALM OF CAPRICES. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Incapacity of the will to form itself : absence of its condi- 
 tions of existence. — The hysterical character. — Whence 
 the instability comes 86 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE EXTINCTION OF THE WILL. 
 
 Two states of extinction. — Ecstasy. Its description by St. 
 Teresa, — Anomaly of this mental state. — Somnambulism : 
 cases of absolute extinction. — Doubtful cases. Examples 
 of resistance. — Illusion of volitional power in some hyp- 
 notised persons 94 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 The will is the final term of a progressive evolution of which 
 the simple reflex is the first. — It is a hierarchic co-ordina- 
 tion. — Law of dissolution of the will : its course. — Verifi- 
 cation by pathological facts. — Material conditions of voli- 
 tional co-ordination. Its physiological development. Its 
 psychological development. Principal forms of this co- 
 ordination. — The will in idiots. The will is the result of 
 a co-ordination and an evolution. — General conclusion : 
 The will is a mere state of consciousness which has in it- 
 self no efficacy to produce a movement or an inhibition. . . 112 
 
THE DISEASES OF THE WILL 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 In recent years several authors, especially in for- 
 eign countries, have given a detailed exposition of cer- 
 tain branches of psychology according to the principle 
 of evolution. It has seemed to me that there would 
 be some profit in treating these questions in the same 
 spirit, but under another form, that of dissolution. 
 
 I propose, then, in this work to attempt for the will 
 what I have formerly done for the memory ; to study 
 its anomalies, and to draw from this study conclusions 
 regarding its normal state. In very man}^ respects the ¥ 
 question is less easy ; the term will designates some- 
 thing more vague than the term memory. Whether 
 one considers memory as a function, a property, or a 
 faculty, it remains none the less a stable mode of be- 
 ing, a psychic disposition, regarding which all the 
 world can come to an agreement. The will, on the 
 contrary, resolves itself into volitions, each one of 
 which is an element, an unstable form of activity, a re- 
 sultant varying according to the causes that produce it. 
 
 Beyond this first difficuhy there is another which 
 may appear greater still, l)ut of which we will not hesi- 
 tate to summarily disembarrass ourselves. Can the 
 pathology of the will be studied without touching upon 
 the inextricable problem of free will? This abstention 
 
2 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL. 
 
 appears to us possible and even necessary. It is imposed 
 not by timidity, but by method. Like every other experi- 
 mental science, psychology ought to rigorously forbid 
 itself all research relative to first causes. The problem 
 of free will is of this order. One of the great services 
 of the criticism of Kant and his successors has been to 
 show that the problem of liberty reduces itself to the 
 question whether one can go outside the chain of effects 
 and causes so as to posit an absolute beginning. That 
 power ''which calls up, suspends, or banishes," as it 
 is defined by a contemporary who has studied it pro- 
 foundly,* can be affirmed only on the condition of en- 
 tering into metaphysics. 
 
 Here we have nothing of the sort to attempt. Ex- 
 perience, internal and external, is our sole object ; its 
 limits are our limits. We take the volitions as facts, 
 with their immediate causes, that is to say, the motives 
 which produce them, without investigating whether 
 these causes suppose other causes ad infinitinu, or 
 whether there is added to them some degree of spon- 
 taneity. The question is thus placed in a form equally 
 acceptable to the determinists and their adversaries, 
 and reconcilable with either hypothesis. We hope, 
 moreover, to conduct our researches in such a manner 
 that the absence of any solution of this point will not 
 even so much as once be noticed. 
 
 I shall try to show at the conclusion of this study 
 that in every voluntary act there are two entirely dis- 
 tinct elements : the state of consciousness, the '' I 
 will," which indicates a situation, but which has in itself 
 no efficacy ; and a very complex ps5xho-physiological 
 mechanism, in which alone resides the power to act or 
 to restrain. As this general conclusion can only be the 
 
 *Renouvier, Essai de critique ghi^rale, second edition, i, 395-406. 
 
IXTR OD UCTIOX. 5 
 
 result of partial conclusions furnished by pathology, I 
 will avoid provisionally in this introduction any sys- 
 tematic view ; I shall limit myself to studying the will 
 in its double mechanism of impulse and inhibition, and 
 in its source — the individual character — neglecting all 
 the details which do not concern our subject.* 
 
 The fundamental principle which dominates the 
 psychology of the will under its impulsive form, in the 
 health}^ as well as in the morbid state, is that every 
 state of consciousness always has a tendency to express 
 itself, to manifest itself by a movement, an act. This 
 principle is only one particular case, peculiar to psy- 
 chology, of this fundamental law : that the reflex is 
 the sole type of all neural action, of all relational life. 
 Properly speaking, activity in the animal is not a be- 
 ginning but an end, not a cause but an effect, not an 
 initiation but a continuation. That is the most essen- 
 tial point, which must never be lost sight of and which 
 alone explains the physiology and the pathology of the 
 will, because this tendency of the state of conscious- 
 ness to expend itself in a psychological or physiological 
 act, conscious or unconscious, is the simple fact to 
 which all the highest combinations and complications 
 of voluntary activity are reducible. 
 
 The new-born child is, as Virchow has defined it, 
 "a mere spinal being." Its activity is purely reflex, 
 and manifests itself by such a profusion of movements 
 
 ♦There will be found in Schneider's recent work, Der menschlicht WilU 
 vom Standpunkte tier neueren lintwickclungstluorien (Berlin, 1SS2), a good 
 monograph on the will in its normal state and from the point of view of evo- 
 Jution. We regret not to have made its acquaintance before this work was al- 
 most completed. 
 
4 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 that the work of education will consist for a long time 
 in suppressing or restraining the greater number of 
 them. This diffusion of reflexes, which has its ground 
 in anatomical relations, manifests in all its simpli- 
 city the transformation of excitation into movement. 
 Though they be conscious or awaken a rudiment of 
 consciousness, in any case they do not represent a vol- 
 untary activity ; they properly express only the activ- 
 ity of the species, what has been acquired, organised 
 and fixed by heredity ; but they are the materials out 
 of which the will is to be built up. 
 
 Desire marks an ascending stage between the re- 
 flex and the voluntary conditions. We understand by 
 desire the most elementary forms of the affective life, 
 the only ones that can be produced so long as the in- 
 tellect is not born. Physiologically they do not differ 
 from reflex movements of a complex kind. Psycho- 
 logically they differ from them only by the state of con- 
 sciousness, often very intense, which accompanies 
 them. Their tendenc}^ to express themselves in acts is 
 immediate and irresistible, like that of reflexes. In the 
 natural state, and in so far as it is yet free from all ad- 
 mixture, desire tends to satisfy itself immediately ; 
 that is its law, it is inscribed in the organism. Little 
 children and savages furnish excellent examples of it. 
 In the adult, desire is no longer in the natural state ; 
 education, habit, and reflexion modify or restrain it. 
 But it often reasserts its rights, and history shows us 
 that in the case of despots, placed by their own opin- 
 ion and that of others above the law, it always retains 
 them. 
 
 Pathology will show us that this form of activity is 
 augmented when the will grows weak, and persists 
 when it disappears. It marks, however, a progress 
 
INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 be3'ond the first period, for it denotes a commencement 
 of individuality. On the common ground of the spe- 
 cific activity, the desires outhne vaguely the individual 
 character ; they reflect the mode of reaction of a par- 
 ticular organism. 
 
 As soon as a sufficient accumulation of experiences 
 has permitted intellect to arise, there is produced a 
 new form of activity, for which the epithet of idco- 
 motor is most convenient, ideas being causes of move- 
 ments. That name has, moreover, the advantage of 
 showing its relationship with reflexes, of which it is 
 only an improvement. 
 
 How can an idea produce movement? That is a 
 question which very much embarrassed the old psy- 
 chology, but which becomes simple when the facts are 
 considered in their true nature. It is a truth now ac- 
 cepted in cerebral physiology that the anatomical basis 
 of all our mental states includes both motor and sen- 
 sory elements. I will not dwell upon a question which 
 has been treated elsewhere in detail * and would neces- 
 sitate a digression. Let us simply remember that our 
 perceptions, in particular the important ones, those of 
 sight and touch, imply as integral elements movements 
 of the eye or the members ; and that if movement is an 
 essential element when we see an object really, it must 
 play the same role when we see it ideally. Images 
 and ideas, even abstract, suppose an anatomical sub- 
 stratum in which the movements are in some measure 
 represented. 
 
 It is true that, on pressing the point more closely, 
 it might be said that it is necessary to distinguish two 
 kinds of motor elements : those which serve to consti- 
 tute a state of consciousness, and those which serve to 
 
 * Revue philoso/>hique, October, 1879, p. 371, et scq. 
 
6 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 expenct it \ the nrst intrinsic, tliC otLers extriiibic. The 
 idea of a ball, for example, is the resultant of impres- 
 sions of surfaces and of special muscular adjustments ; 
 but the latter are the result of muscular sensibility, 
 and, in this aspect, are sensations of movement rather 
 than movements properly so called ; they are constit- 
 uent elements of our idea rather than a manner of ex- 
 pressing it outwardl}^ 
 
 At the same time, this close rjelation established by 
 physiology between the idea and the movement per- 
 mits us in some degree to perceive how one produces 
 the other. In reality, an idea does not produce a 
 movement : that sudden and remarkable change of 
 function would be a marvellous thing. The sudden 
 production of a play of the muscles by an idea, such 
 as defined by metaphysicians, would be scarcely less 
 than a miracle. It is not the state of consciousness as 
 such, but rather the corresponding physiological state 
 which transforms itself into an act. In short, the re- 
 lation is not between a psychical event and a move- 
 ment, but between two states of the same kind, be- 
 tween two physiological states, two groups of nervous 
 elements, one sensory and the other motor. If one 
 insists upon making of consciousness a cause, all re- 
 mains obscure ; but if it is considered as simply the 
 accompaniment of a nervous process, which alone is 
 the essential element, all becomes clear and the imag- 
 inary difficulties vanish. 
 
 This admitted, we can classify ideas roughly into 
 three groups, according as their tendency to transform 
 themselves into action is strong, moderate, or weak 
 and even, in a certain sense, null. 
 
 i) The first group includes extremely intense in- 
 tellectual states, of which fixed ideas ma}^ serve as a 
 
INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 type. They pass into action with a fatality and rapid- 
 ity almost equal to those of reflexes. These are the 
 ideas which ''take hold of us." The old psychology, 
 affirming a fact of common experience, said in its own 
 language that tlie intellect acts upon the will only 
 through the mediation of sensibilit3\ Leaving aside 
 those entities, this signifies that the nervous state corre- 
 sponding to an idea expresses itself so much the better 
 in movements according as it is accompanied by those 
 other nervous states, whatever they may be, which cor- 
 respond to sentiments. The phraseology thus changed, 
 it can be understood why, in the case before us, we 
 are so near the preceding phase, and why the nervous 
 action is more energetic and affects a greater number 
 of elements. 
 
 Most of the passions, as soon as they transcend 
 the level of mere appetite, enter into this group as 
 principles of action. The whole difference is one of 
 degree, according as the affective elements predomi- 
 nate in the complex thus formed or the reverse.'*' 
 
 2) The second group is the most important for us. 
 It represents the rational activity, the will in the usual 
 sense of the word. The conception is followed by an 
 act after a short or long deliberation. It will be found, 
 upon reflexion, that the greater part of our actions fall 
 under this type, leaving aside habits and the forms 
 already described. Whether I rise up in order to take 
 
 • The relative independence of the idea and the feeling as causes of move- 
 ment is clearly established by certain pathological cases. It sometimes hap- 
 pens that the idea of a movement is by itself alone incapable of producing 
 it, but if emotion ensue it is produced. A man stricken with paralysis cannot 
 move his arm by any effort of will ; while it will be observed to be violently 
 agitated under the influence of an emotion caused by the arrival of a friend. 
 In cases of softening of the spinal marrow inducing paralysis, an emotion, or 
 a question addressed to the patient, may cause most violent movements in the 
 lower members over which his will has no control. 
 
8 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 the air at my window or enlist in order to become one 
 day a general, there is only the difference between a 
 less and a greater, a volition very complex and at long 
 range like the last necessarily resolving itself into a 
 series of simple volitions successively adapted to times 
 and places. 
 
 In this group the tendency to the act is neither in- 
 stantaneous nor violent. The concomitant affective 
 state is moderate. Very many actions which form the 
 ordinary routine of our life were at first accompanied 
 by a feeling of pleasure, curiosity, etc. Now the prim- 
 itive sentiment has become enfeebled, but the bond 
 between the idea and the act has been established ; 
 when the one arises the other follows. 
 
 3) In abstract ideas, the tendency to movement is 
 at its minimum. These ideas being representations 
 of representations, pure schemata, extracts fixed by a 
 symbol, the motor element is diminished in the same 
 degree as the representative element. If all the forms 
 of activity which we have just passed in review be con- 
 sidered as successive complications of the simple re- 
 flex, we might say that abstract ideas are a collateral 
 ramification, which is attached feebly to the principal 
 trunk, and has developed in its own way. Their motor 
 tendency is reduced to that interior utterance, slight 
 as it may be, which accompanies them, or to the 
 awakening of some other state of consciousness. For 
 just as in physiology the centrifugal period of a reflex 
 does not always end in a movement, but as likely in 
 the secretion of a gland or a trophic action ; in the 
 same way, in psychology, a state of consciousness ends 
 -not always in a movement but in the resurrection of 
 other states of consciousness accordmg to the well- 
 known mechanism of association. 
 
INTRODUCTION, g 
 
 The contrast so often noted between the specula- 
 tive minds that dwell among abstractions, and prac- 
 tical people, is only the visible and palpable expression 
 of those psychological conditions that we have just 
 pointed out. Let us recall again, by way of elucida- 
 tion, a few well-worn truths : the difference between 
 knowing the good and practising it, seeing the absurd- 
 ity of a belief and getting rid of it, condemning a pas- 
 sion and renouncing it. All this is explained by the 
 extremely feeble motor tendenc}^ of an isolated idea. 
 We are ignorant of the anatomical and ph^^siological 
 conditions necessary for the production of an abstract 
 idea, but we can affirm without temerity that by the 
 time it becomes a motive of action other elements are' 
 added to it ; which happens with those who "are de- 
 voted to an idea." Alan is led by his feelings alone. 
 
 II. 
 
 In the light of the preceding observations, voluntary 
 activity appears to us as a stage in that ascending evo- 
 lution which goes from the simple reflex, whose ten- 
 dency to movement is irresistible, to the abstract idea, 
 where the tendency to act is at its minimum. Neither 
 the commencement nor the end can be rigorously fixed, 
 the transition from one form to the other being almost 
 insensible. 
 
 Designedly, and for the sake of clearness, we have 
 not examined the problem in all its complexity. We 
 have even eliminated one of the essential and charac- 
 teristic elements of will. As it has hitherto been con- 
 sidered it might be defined : A conscious act more or 
 less deliberate, in view of an end simple or complex, 
 near or remote. It is thus that contemporary authors 
 
lo THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 such as Maudsley and Lewes appear to understand 
 it, when they define it as ''impulse by ideas " or ''the 
 motor reaction of feeHngs and ideas." Thus under- 
 stood, voHtion would simply be a laissei'-faii'e. But it 
 is quite another thing. It is also a power of arresta- 
 tion, or, in the language of physiology, an inhibitive 
 power. 
 
 For the psycholog}^ founded upon interior observa- 
 tion alone, this distinction between permitting and 
 preventing has little importance ; but for the psychology 
 which asks from the physiological mechanism some 
 enlightenment on the operations of the mind, — and 
 which considers the reflex as the type of all activity, — 
 it is of capital importance. 
 
 The prevailing doctrine supposes that the will is a 
 fiat which the muscles obey, one knows not how. In 
 this hypothesis, it matters little w^hether the fiat com- 
 mands a movement or a cessation of movement. But 
 if it be admitted, with all contemporary physiologists, 
 that the reflex is the type and basis of all action, and if, 
 consequently, there is no room to inquire why a state of 
 consciousness transforms itself into movement, since 
 that is the law, it must be explained wh}' it does not so 
 transform itself. Unhappily ph3^siology is full of ob- 
 scurities and indecisions upon this point. 
 
 The most simple case of the phenomenon of stop- 
 ping or inhibition consists in the suspension of the move- 
 ments of the heart by an excitation of the pneumogas- 
 tric or vagus nerve. The heart is known to be inner- 
 vated, independently of the intra-cardiac nerve-ganglia, 
 by filaments coming from the great sympathetic, which 
 accelerate its pulsations, and by filaments from the 
 vagus. 
 
 The section of these last auerments the movements : 
 
IXTR OD UCTIOy, 1 1 
 
 the excitation of the central terminus, on the contrar}^ 
 suspends them for a longer or shorter time. It is then 
 a nerve of arrestation, and the inhibition is generally 
 considered as the result of an interference. The reflex 
 activity of the cardiac centres is retarded or suspended 
 by the excitations coming from the medulla. In other 
 words, the motor action of the pneumogastric expends 
 itself in the cardiac centres which are in a state of ac- 
 tivity, and produces an inhibition. All this has no 
 immediate psychological bearing, but here is some- 
 thing that concerns us more. 
 
 It is a well-known fact that the reflex excitability of 
 the spinal cord increases when it is withdrawn from 
 the action of the brain. The condition of decapitated 
 animals furnishes striking proofs of it. Without hav- 
 ing recourse to these extreme cases, we know that re- 
 flexes are much more intense during sleep than in the 
 waking state. In order to explain this fact some au- 
 thors have supposed the existence in the brain of cen- 
 tres of arrest. Setschenow placed them in the optic 
 thalami and the region of the corpora quadrigemina. 
 He relied upon the fact that by exciting those parts by 
 chemical or other means he produced a depression of 
 reflex activity. Goltz places these inhibiting centres 
 in the brain proper. 
 
 These and other analogous hypotheses* have been 
 very much criticised, and many physiologists suppose 
 merely that in the normal state the excitations distrib- 
 ute themselves at the same time in the brain by an 
 ascending course, and in tlie spinal cord by a trans- 
 verse course ; and that, on the contrary, in cases where 
 
 • For the complete history of the question may be consulted Eckhard, 
 Phyiiologie des RHckenmarks, in Hermann's IVtysioloj,'if (Leipsic, 1879), vol. ii, 
 part ii, p. 33 et seq , where will be found the experiments and interpretations 
 pf Setschenow, Goltz, Schiff, Hcrzen, Cyon, etc., etc. 
 
12 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL. 
 
 the brain can play no part, the excitations finding only 
 a single wa}^ open there thence results a sort of accumu- 
 lation, the effect of which is an exaggerated reflex ex- 
 citability. 
 
 Recently, Ferrier, * placing himself at a point of view 
 the psychological importance of which is evident, has 
 supposed the existence in the frontal lobes of moderat- 
 ing centres, which would be the essential factor of at- 
 tention. 
 
 Without entering into more details, it is seen that 
 for the explanation of the mechanism of inhibition 
 there is no clear and universally accepted theory like 
 that for the reflexes. Some suppose that the arresta- 
 tion comes from two contrary tendencies which impede 
 or -annihilate each other. Others postulate inhibiting 
 centres, and even inhibiting nerves, capable of sup- 
 pressing a transmitted action instead of reinforcing it. 
 There are still other hypotheses, which it is useless to 
 mention. f In this state of ignorance let u^examine the 
 question as best we may. 
 
 In all voluntary inhibition there are two things to 
 be considered : the mechanism that produces it,of ^vhich 
 we have just spoken ; and the state of consciousness 
 that accompanies it, of which we are now to speak. 
 
 In the first place, there are cases where the arresta- 
 tion does not need to be explained, those in wnich the 
 voluntary incitation ceases of itself ; when we throw 
 aside, for example, a decidedly tiresome book. 
 
 Other cases appear to be explainable by one of the 
 hypotheses given above. We voluntaril}^ arrest laugh- 
 ter, yawning, coughing, and certain passionate move- 
 
 * Ferrier (David), The Functions of the Brain (New York, iS86), pp. 103, 104. 
 t See Wundt (Wilhelm), Mechanik der Nerven (Stu 
 84, et seq.; Lewes, Physical Basis of Mind, pp. 300-301. 
 
 t See Wundt (Wilhelm), Mechanik der Nerven (Stuttgart, 1876) ^ part ii, p. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 ments, by putting in action, as it would seem, the an- 
 tagonistic muscles. 
 
 In the cases where we do not know how the inhibi- 
 tion is produced, where the physiological mechanism 
 remains unknown, pure psychology can still teach us 
 something. Let us take the most commonplace ex- 
 ample : a fit of anger stopped by the will. In order 
 not to exaggerate the voluntary power, let us remark 
 in the first place that this restraint is far from being 
 the rule. Certain individuals appear altogether inca- 
 pable of it. Others are so very unequally; their re- 
 straining power varies according to the time and the 
 circumstances. Very few are always masters of them- 
 selves. 
 
 There is necessary for the production of the re- 
 straint one first condition: time. • If the incitationbe 
 so violent that it passes immediately into action, all is 
 over ; whatever folly ensues, it is too late. If the con- 
 dition of time be fulfilled, if the state of consciousness 
 give rise to antagonistic states, if these be sufficiently 
 stable, the restraint takes place. The new state of 
 consciousness tends to suppress the other, and, by en- 
 feebling the cause, checks the effects. 
 
 It is of prime importance for the pathology of the 
 will to investigate the ph}'siological phenomenon which 
 occurs in such a case. There can be no doubt that the 
 quantity of the nervous influx (whatever opinion may 
 be licld as to its nature) varies from one individual to 
 a'nother, and from one moment to another in the same 
 individual. Neither can it be dcjiibtcd that at a given 
 moment in any particular individual the disposable 
 quantity may be distributed in a variable manner. It 
 Is cleaf that in the metaphysician wlio is sj)cculating, 
 and the man who is satisfying a physical passion, the 
 
14 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 quantity of nervous influx is not expended in the same 
 manner, and that one form of expenditure prevents 
 the other, the disposable capital not being able to 
 be employed at the same time for two different pur- 
 poses. 
 
 ''We see," says a physiologist,* ''that the excita- 
 bility of certain nervous centres is reduced by calling 
 certain others into action, if the excitations which 
 reach the latter possess a certain intensity ; such is 
 the fact. 
 
 " If we consider the normal functioning of the ner- 
 vous system, we observe that there exists a necessary 
 equilibrium between its different structures. We know 
 that this equilibrium can be broken only by the abnor- 
 mal predominance of certain centres, which seem to 
 divert to their own profit too large a part of the ner- 
 vous activity; thenceforth the functioning of the other 
 centres shows itself to be disturbed. . . . There are 
 general laws which preside over the apportionment of 
 the nervous activity in the different points of the 
 system, as there are mechanical laws governing the 
 circulation of the blood in the vascular system ; if a 
 great perturbation arises in an important vascular de- 
 partment, the effect cannot fail to be felt at all other 
 points in the S3^stem. These laws of h3^drodynamics 
 we perceive, because the fluid in circulation is accessi- 
 ble to us, and we know the properties of the vessels 
 that contain it, and the effects of elasticity, muscular 
 contraction, etc. But the laws of the distribution "of 
 nervous activity, of that species of circulation of what 
 has been named the nervous fluid, — who knows them? 
 We observe the effects of rupture of the equilibrium of 
 
 * Franck (Francois), Dictionnaire encyclopedique des sciences medicales 
 (Paris, 1878), art. " Nerveux," p. 572. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 15 
 
 nerve-action, but they are essentially variable distur- 
 bances, which still refuse to lend themselves to any 
 theory. We can only take note of their production, 
 and keep account of the conditions that accompany 
 them." 
 
 If we apply these general considerations to our par- 
 ticular case, what do we see? The original state of con- 
 sciousness (anger) has awakened antagonistic states, 
 varying necessarily from one man to another : the idea 
 of duty, or the fear of God, of opinion, of the laws, of 
 disastrous consequences, etc. 
 
 There is thus produced a second centre of action, 
 that is to sa}', in physiological terms, a derivation of 
 the nervous afflux, an impoverishment of the first state 
 to the profit of the second. Is this derivation sufficient 
 to re-establish the equilibrium? The event alone gives 
 the answer. 
 
 But when the inhibition takes place it is never 
 more than relative, and its only result is to lead to a 
 diminished action. What remains of the original im- 
 pulse expends itself as it can, by half-restrained ges- 
 tures, visceral agitations, or some artificial derivation, 
 as in the case of the soldier who while he was being shot 
 chewed a bullet, so that he might not cry out. Very 
 few are sufficiently well endowed by nature and fash- 
 ioned b}^ habit as to reduce the reflexes to imperceptible 
 movements. This derivation of the nervous influx is 
 not then a primitive fact, but a state of secondary forma- 
 tion, established at the expense of the first by means 
 of an association. 
 
 Let us remark again tliat, besides the birth of these 
 two antagonistic centres of action, tliere are other 
 causes which tend to enfeeble dircctl}' tlie primitive 
 impulses. 
 
i6 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 But we ought here to examine the difficulty more 
 closely, for the co-existence of these two contrary states 
 of consciousness,* though sufficient to produce indeci- 
 sion, uncertainty, and inaction, is not enough to cause 
 a voluntary arrestation, in the real sense of the word, 
 an '' I will not." A further condition is necessary. It 
 is found in an affective element of the highest impor- 
 tance of which we have said nothing. Feelings are 
 not all stimulants to action. Many of them have a de- 
 pi^essive character. Terror may be considered as their 
 extreme type. In its highest degree its effect is pros- 
 trating. A man suddenly stricken with a great sorrow 
 is incapable of any reaction, voluntary or reflex. The 
 cerebral anaemia, the arresting of the heart sometimes 
 bringing on death by syncope, the perspiration with 
 coldness of the skin, the relaxation of the sphincters : 
 all shows that the excitability of the muscular, vaso- 
 motor, secretory, and other centres is temporarily sus- 
 pended. This case is extreme, but it gives an enlarge- 
 ment to our view. Below it we have all possible de- 
 grees of fear, with all the corresponding degrees of 
 depression. 
 
 Descending from this maximum to moderate fear, 
 the depressive effect diminishes, but without changing 
 in nature. Pray how are the movements of anger 
 stopped in the child? By threats and reproofs ; that is 
 to say, by the production of a new state of consciousness 
 of a depressive character, and calculated to paralyse 
 the action. ^'A child of three months and a half," says 
 B. Perez, '' understands, from the expression of the 
 countenance and the tone of the voice, that it is being 
 reprimanded ; then its forehead contracts, its lips twitch 
 
 *It is well understood that we do not separate them from their physio- 
 logical conditions, which are the principal element. 
 
INTR Ol) UCTION. 1 7 
 
 convulsively and pout an instant, its eyes become moist 
 with tears, and it is on the point of sobbing.'"*" 
 
 The new state tends, then, to supplani: the other, 
 not only by its own strength, but by the enfeeblement 
 that it inflicts upon the entire being. 
 
 If, in spite of repeated menaces, the inhibition be 
 not produced, the individual is little or not at all edu- 
 cable in this respect. If it be produced, the result is 
 that, in virtue of a well-known law, an association tends 
 to be established between the two states ; the first 
 awakens the second, — its corrective, — and, by habit, 
 the restraint becomes more and more easy and rapid. 
 In those who are masters of themselves the restraint 
 takes place with that certainty which is the mark of 
 every perfect habit. It is clear, moreover, that the tem- 
 perament and the character are of yet more significance 
 here than education. 
 
 It is then not surprising that a tempest should give 
 way before cold ideas, before states of consciousness 
 whose motor tendency is quite weak ; it is because 
 there is behind them an accumulated, latent, uncon- 
 scious force, such as we have just observed. 
 
 For an understanding of this apparent miracle, the 
 educated and reflecting adult must not be considered, 
 but the child. With the latter (the savage, and the 
 unpolished or uneducable man approximate to it) the 
 tendency to act is immediate. The work of education 
 consists precisely in arousing these antagonistic states ; 
 and by education must be understood that which the 
 cliild owes to its own experience as well as that which 
 it receives from others. 
 
 I believe it needless, moreover, to j)oint out that 
 
 * Bernaul Perez, A/t trois pri-mi>rei annees lir I'l-ufant, p. 33. Translate<l 
 by Alice M. Christi, Tlu- First Three \'eiirs 0/ Childhood (London, 18S5), p. 29. 
 
i8 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 all the sentiments which produce an arrest : fear or 
 respect for persons, laws, customs, or God, have been 
 in origin and always remain depressive states, tending 
 to diminish action. 
 
 In short, the phenomenon of inhibition can be ex- 
 plained in a way sufficient for our purpose, by an anal- 
 ysis of the psychological conditions under which it is 
 produced, whatever opinion one may have regarding 
 the physiological mechanism. It would doubtless be 
 desirable to see into it more distinctly, to have a clearer 
 idea of the modus opermidi by which tv/o nearly simul- 
 taneous excitations neutralise each other. If this ob- 
 scure question were settled our conception of the will 
 as a restraining power would become more precise, and 
 perhaps be greatly modified. We must resign our- 
 selves to waiting ; we shall, moreover, meet with this 
 most difficult problem again, in other forms. 
 
 III. 
 
 We have hitherto considered, the voluntary activity 
 under an exclusively analytical form, which is unable 
 to give an exact idea of it, or show it in its totality. It 
 is neither a simple transformation of some states of 
 consciousness or other into movement, nor a simple 
 power of restraint ; it is the distinctive reaction of an 
 individual. We must insist upon this point, without 
 which the pathology is incomprehensible. 
 
 The first characteristic of voluntar}^ movements is 
 that they are adapted \ but this is a mark they have in 
 common with the immense majority of physiological 
 movements ; the difference is only in degrees. 
 
 Leaving aside the movements of a pathological order 
 (convulsions, St. Vitus's dance, epilepsy, etc.) which 
 
INTR OD UCTION, 1 9 
 
 Occur In the form of a violent and irregular discharge, 
 adaptation is to be met with from the lowest to the 
 highest. 
 
 Ordinary reflexes are reactions of the spinal cord, 
 adapted to conditions which are very general, and con- 
 sequently very simple, uniform, and invariable from 
 one Individual to another (save in exceptional cases). 
 They have a specific character. 
 
 Another group of reflexes represents the reactions 
 of the base and the medial portion of the encephalon, 
 — the medulla, corpora striata, and optic thalami. 
 These reactions also are adapted to general conditions 
 which are only slightly variable, but of an order very 
 much more complex : it is the ' ' sensory-motor " activity 
 of certain authors. The}^ have still a character rather 
 more specific than individual, so great is their resem- 
 blance in different individuals of the same species. 
 
 Cerebral reflexes, especially the highest, consist in 
 a reaction adapted to conditions which are very com- 
 plex, very variable, very unstable, differing from one 
 individual to another, and from one instant to another 
 In the same individual. These are the Ideo-motor re- 
 actions, the volitions. However perfect it may be, this 
 adaptation is still not the thing that Is of Importance to 
 us. It is only an effect, the cause of which is not voli- 
 tion but intellectual activity. 
 
 The Intellect being a correspondence, a continual 
 adjustment of internal to external relations, and In Its 
 highest form a perfectly co-ordinated adjustment ; the 
 co-ordination of these states of consciousness Implies 
 that of the movements which express them. As soon 
 as an end Is chosen, It acts after the manner of what 
 metaphysicians call a final cause : It brings about the 
 selection of the means proper for attaining it. The 
 
26 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 adaptation is then a result of the mechanism of the in- 
 tellect. We need not dwell upon this point. 
 
 But what interests us is this choice, this preference 
 declared after a longer or shorter comparison of mo- 
 tives. It is this that represents the individual reac- 
 tion, which is distinct from the specific reactions, and, 
 as we shall see in the pathology, sometimes inferior, 
 sometimes superior to them. 
 
 What is this choice ? Considered in its form, it is 
 nothing more than a practical affirmation, a judgment 
 that accomplishes itself. Let it be Avell remarked : 
 From the physiological and exterior side nothing dis- 
 tinguishes a voluntary movement from an involuntary 
 one ; the mechanism is the same, whether I wink ni}^ 
 eye by reflex action or designedly in order to warn an 
 accomplice.* From the psychological and interior 
 side nothing distinguishes the judgment, in the logical 
 sense of the word, that is,* a theoretical affirmation, 
 from volition ; except that the latter expresses itself by 
 an act, and is thus a judgment put in execution. 
 
 But what is it, considered in its essence instead 
 of in its form? Let us dwell upon this fundamental 
 point and try to clear it up. By descending to some 
 very lowly biological facts, we shall perhaps see better 
 in what a choice consists. In order not to lose ni}'- 
 self in remote analogies, I will sa}^ nqthing of ph^^si- 
 cal affinity (for example, that of the magnet for iron). 
 In the vegetablc'kingdom, I will simply recall that the 
 insectivorous plants, like the Dioncca (Venus's fly-trap), 
 
 *In physiology a distinction is made between voluntary and involuntary 
 muscles, although it is understood that this distinction has in it nothing abso- 
 lute. There are persons, like the physiologist E. F. Weber, who can at will stop 
 the motions of their heart ; others, like Fontana, can produce a contraction of 
 the iris, etc. A movement is voluntary, when, as a result of successive and re- 
 peated efforts, it is linked to a state of consciousness and under its control. 
 
Introduction. 21 
 
 select certain bodies which come into contact with 
 them to the exclusion of others. The amoeba chooses 
 in the same wa}' certain organic fragments, with which 
 it nourishes itself. These facts are incontestable, but 
 their interpretation is difficult. They are explained, in 
 general, by a relation of molecular composition be- 
 tween what chooses and what is chosen. Without 
 doubt, choice is here exerted in a ver}^ limited field ; but 
 it is also no more than its rudest form, almost physical. 
 By the origin and development of a more and more 
 complex nervous system, this blind affinity is developed 
 into a conscious tcndenc}^ then into several contradic- 
 tory tendencies, one of which prevails — that which 
 represents the maximum of affinit}^ (the dog which 
 hesitates between several messes and ends in choosing 
 one). But in all cases choice expresses the nature 
 of the individual, at a given minute, under given cir- 
 cumstances, and in a given degree ; that is to say, the 
 more feeble the affinity the less marked is the pre- 
 ference. Hence we are able to say that choice, let it 
 result from a single tendency, from several tendencies, 
 from a present sensation, from images recalled, from 
 complex ideas, or from complicated calculations reach- 
 ing out into futurity, is alwa3's founded on an affinit}', 
 an analogy of nature, an adaptation. This is true in 
 the case of the animal, lower or higher, and of man, 
 for vice or virtue, for science or pleasure or ambition. 
 To limit ourselves to man, two or more states of con- 
 sciousness arise as possible ends of action ; after some 
 oscillations, one is preferred, chosen. Why, if not be- 
 cause that between that state and the sum of conscious, 
 sub-conscious, and unconscious (purely physical) states 
 which at the moment constitute the person, the ego, 
 there is conformity, analogy of nature, affinity? This 
 
22 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL. 
 
 is the only possible explanation of choice, unless to 
 admit that it is without cause. It is proposed to me 
 to kill a friend ; this tendency is repulsed with horror, 
 excluded ; that is to say, it is in contradiction with my 
 other tendencies and sentiments, there is no possible 
 association between it and them, and by that very fact 
 it is annihilated. 
 
 In the criminal, on the contrary, there is estab- 
 lished between the representation of murder and the 
 feelings of hatred or cupidity a bond of congruity, that 
 is to say, of analogy; it is consequently chosen, affirmed 
 as having ought to be. Considered as a state of con- 
 sciousness, volition is, then, notliing rnore tha?i a?i affirma- 
 tion (or a negation). It is analogous to the judgment, 
 with this difference, that one expresses a relation of 
 congruity (or incongruity) between ideas, the other 
 the same relation between tendencies ; that one is a 
 repose for the mind, the other a stage on the wa}^ to 
 action ; that one is an acquisition, the other an aliena- 
 tion ; for the intellect is an economy, and the will an 
 expenditure. But volition by itself, as a state of con- 
 sciousness, has no more efficacy to produce an act than 
 a judgment to produce truth. The efficacy comes from 
 elsewhere. We will return in the conclusion to this 
 very important point.* The ultimate reason of the 
 choice is then in the character, that is to sa}^ in what 
 constitutes the peculiar mark of the individual in the 
 
 * We have just expressed under another form this evident fact that the 
 choice proceeds always in the direction of the greatest pleasure. No animal, 
 endowed with reason or deprived of it, healthy or diseased, can will anything 
 but what see7ns to it at the moment its greatest good or its least ill. Even the 
 man who prefers death to dishonor or apostasy chooses the least disagreeable 
 part. The individual character and the degree of development of the reason 
 cause the choice sometimes to mount very high, sometimes to fall very low ; but 
 it always tends towards what pleases the most. The contrary is impossible. 
 That is a psychological truth so clear that the ancients had already laid it down 
 as an axiom, and it has taken volumes of metaphysics to obscure it. 
 
INTRODUCTION, 23 
 
 psychological sense and differentiates him from all 
 other individuals of his species. 
 
 The character, or, to employ a more general term, 
 the person, the ego, which is to us a cause, is it in its 
 turn an effect? No doubt ; but we need not occupy 
 ourselves here with the causes which produce it. The 
 science of character, which John Stuart Mill called 
 for, more than forty years ago, under the name of 
 ethology, is not yet in existence, nor is it, it seems to 
 me, near jto being formed. Were it so, we should only 
 have to accept its results, without attempting an ex- 
 cursion into its domain ; for to ascend forever, from 
 effects to causes, in an endless progression, would be 
 to follow the vagaries of metaph3^sics. Yet again, for 
 the subject which occupies us, the character is an ulti- 
 mate fact, a true cause, even though for investigations 
 of another kind it be an effect. Let us remark in pass- 
 ing, and merely by way of suggestion, that the charac- 
 ter — that is to say, the ego, in so much as it reacts — 
 is an extremely complex product, that heredity, pre- 
 natal and post-natal physiological conditions, educa- 
 tion, and experience have contributed to form. It can 
 be stated also without temerity, that what constitutes 
 it are much rather affective states, a peculiar manner 
 of feeling, than an intellectual activity. It is this gen- 
 eral manner of feeling, this permanent tone of the or- 
 ganism, which is the first and true motor. If it is 
 lacking, man can no more will ; pathology will show us 
 this. It is because this fundamental state is, accord- 
 ing to the constitution of the individuals, stable or 
 fluctuating, continuous or variable, energetic or feeble, 
 that there are three principal types of will, strong, 
 weak, and intermittent, with all the degrees and shades 
 of which these types admit; but, we again repeat, 
 
24 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 these differences arise from the character of the indi- 
 vidual, which depends upon his special constitution ; 
 there is nothing to be sought for beyond that. 
 
 We are, then, completely in accord with those who 
 deny that the predominance of one motive is sufficient 
 to explain volition. The preponderating motive is 
 but a part of the cause, and always the least, although 
 the most visible ; and it only has efficacy in so far as 
 it is chosen, that is to say, as it enters as an integral 
 part into the sum of states which constitute the ego at 
 a given moment, and as its tendency to act is added 
 to that group of tendencies which spring from the char- 
 acter, to be consolidated with them. It is then in no 
 wise necessary to make of the ego an entity, or to place 
 it in a transcendental region in order to recognise in it a 
 true causality. It is a fact of experience, very simple, 
 very clear ; the contrary is not comprehensible. 
 
 Physiologically, this signifies that the voluntary 
 act differs both from the simple reflex, where a single 
 impression is followed by a single contraction, and 
 from more complex forms, where a single impression 
 is followed by a number of contractions ; that it is the 
 result of the entire nervous organisation, which itself 
 reflects the nature of the whole organism and reacts in 
 consequence. Psychologically, it signifies that the 
 voluntary act, in its complete form, is not the simple 
 transformation of a state of consciousness into move- 
 ment, but that it supposes the participation of the 
 whole group of conscious or sub-conscious states which 
 constitute the ego at a given moment. 
 
 ■ We are therefore justified in defining the will to be 
 an individual reaction, and in holding it for that which 
 is the very inmost in us. The ego, although an effect, 
 
INTR OD UCTION. 25 
 
 is a cause. It is so in the most rigorous sense, in such 
 a way as to satisfy all exigencies. 
 
 To sum up, we have seen that from the lowest re- 
 flex to the highest will, the transition is insensible, and 
 that it is impossible to say exactly at what moment 
 there commences the volition proper, that is to say, 
 the personal reaction. From one extreme of the series 
 to the other, the difference is reduced to two points : 
 on one hand, an extreme simplicity; on the other, an 
 extreme complexity; — on one hand, a reaction always 
 the same in all the individuals of the same species ; 
 on the other, a reaction which varies according to the 
 individual, that is to say, according to a particular 
 organism limited in time and space. Simplicity and 
 permanence, complexity and mutation, go together. 
 
 It is clear that, from the point of view of evolution, 
 all reactions have been in their origin individual. They 
 have become organic, specific, by numberless repeti- 
 tions in the individual and the race. The origin of will 
 is in the property which living matter has of reacting, 
 its end is in the property which living matter has of 
 acquiring habits ; and it is that involuntary activity 
 forever fixed which serves as support and instrument 
 to the individual activity. 
 
 But among the higher animals the hereditary leg- 
 acy, the accidents of birth, the continual adaptation 
 to conditions varying at every instant, do not permit 
 the individual reaction to become fixed or to take the 
 same form in all individuals. The complexity of their 
 environment is a safeguard against automatism. 
 
 We here bring to an end these preliminaries, with 
 the reminder that their single aim was to prepare for 
 the pathological stud}- upon which we are now to enter. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL. I. DEFECT OF 
 IMPULSE. 
 
 We have seen that this term ivill applies to acts 
 which differ considerably in regard to the conditions 
 of their genesis, but which all have this character in 
 common, of being, in some form and degree, a re- 
 action of the individual. Without returning to that 
 analysis, let us note, for the sake of clearness and pre- 
 cision, two exterior characters by which true volition 
 is recognisable : it is a definitive state ; it expresses 
 itself by an act. 
 
 Irresolution, which is the beginning of a morbid 
 state, has interior causes that pathology will enable us 
 to understand : it arises from the weakness of the in- 
 citations or from their ephemeral action. Among ir- 
 resolute characters, some — a very small number — are 
 so on account of a wealth of ideas. The comparison of 
 motives, reasoning, the calculation of consequences, 
 constitute an extremely complex cerebral state wherein 
 the tendencies to action counteract one another. But 
 this opulence of ideas taken alone is not a sufficient 
 cause of irresolution ; it is only an adjuvant cause. 
 The true cause here as everywhere is in the character. 
 
 In the irresolute who are poor in ideas, this can be 
 seen more clearly. If they act it is always in the di- 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL. 27 
 
 rection of the least action or of the most feeble resist- 
 ance. Deliberation leads with difficulty to choice, and 
 choice with more difficulty to an act. 
 
 Volition, on the contrary, is a definitive state; it 
 closes the debate. By its means a new state of con- 
 sciousness — the selected motive — enters into the ego 
 as an integral portion to an exclusion of other states. 
 The ego is thus constituted in a set manner. In fickle 
 natures this definitive state is always provisional, that 
 is to say, the willing ego is so unstable a compound 
 that the most insignificant state of consciousness that 
 may spring up modifies or wholly changes it. The 
 compound formed at each instant has no force of resis- 
 tance at the instant which follows. In that sum of con- 
 scious and unconscious states which from moment to 
 moment represents the causes of volition, the part 
 played by the individual character is a minimum, the 
 share of the exterior circumstances a maximum. We 
 fall back into that inferior form of volition studied 
 above which consists in a ''letting go.'' 
 
 After all it must never be forgotten that to will is 
 to act, that volition is a transition to action. To re- 
 duce the will, as has sometimes been done, to a simple 
 resolution, that is, to the theoretical affirmation that a 
 thing is to be done, is to content oneself with an ab- 
 straction. Choice is but one stage in the process of 
 volition. If it does not translate itself into action, im- 
 mediatel}^ or in due time, there is no longer anything 
 to distinguish it from a logical operation of the mind. 
 It resembles those written laws which are not enforced. 
 
 These remarks made, we enter upon the domain of 
 pathology. We may divide the diseases of the will into 
 two great classes, according as it is impairfd or extin- 
 guished. 
 
28 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL. 
 
 The impairments of the will constitute the most 
 important part of its pathology ; they show the mech- 
 anism out of order. We shall subdivide them into 
 two groups. 
 
 1. Impairment by defect of impulse ; 
 
 2. Impairment by excess of impulse. 
 
 3. Because of their importance we shall examine 
 separately the impairments of voluntary attention. 
 
 4. Finally, under the title of ''The Realm of Ca- 
 prices," we shall study a peculiar state in which the 
 will never succeeds in forming itself, or does so only 
 by accident. 
 
 The first group^contains facts of a simple and clear 
 character, the examination of which is instructive. In 
 the normal state a suggestion of it is found in those 
 easy-going characters who, in order to act, need to 
 have another will added to their own ; but disease will 
 show us this state prodigiously exaggerated. 
 
 Guislain has described in general terms that im- 
 pairment w^hich physicians designate by the name of 
 abulia. *'The patients know how to will interiorl}^ 
 mentally, according to the dictates of reason. They 
 may experience the desire to do something, but are 
 powerless to act accordingly. There is at the bottom 
 of their understanding an incapacity. They would 
 wish to work and they cannot. . . . Their will cannot 
 go beyond certain limits ; one would say that this 
 power of action undergoes an inhibition : the / will 
 does not transform itself into impelling volition, into 
 active determination. Some patients are themselves 
 astonished at the impotence with which their will is 
 stricken. . . . When they are left to themselves they 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE Will. 29 
 
 pass entire days in their bed or on a chair. When any 
 one addresses and arouses them, they express them- 
 selves suitably, although in a short manner ; and they 
 judge of things fairly well."* 
 
 As those patients whose intellect is intact are the 
 most interesting, we shall cite only cases of this kind. 
 One of the oldest and best-known observations is due 
 to Esquirol : 
 
 *'A magistrate, very distinguished for his learning 
 and power of language, was, as a result of troubles, 
 attacked with a fit of monomania. . . . He has recov- 
 ered the entire use of his reason ; but he will not go 
 into the world again, although he recognises that he is 
 wrong ; nor take care of his business, although he 
 knows well that it suffers on account of his whim. His 
 conversation is both rational and clever. When one 
 speaks to him of travelling, or of looking after his 
 affairs, he answers : ' I know that I ought to do it, and 
 yet I cannot. Your counsels are very good ; I would 
 like to follow your advice. I am convinced, but only 
 make me able to will with that volition which deter- 
 mines and executes. ' 'It is certain,' he said to me 
 one da}^, *that I have no will except not to will; for I 
 have all my reason ; I know what I ought to do ; but 
 strength fails me when I ought to act.' "f 
 
 The English Dr. Bennett reports the case of a man 
 ''who frequently could not carry out what he wished 
 to perform. Often, in endeavoring to undress, lie was 
 two hours before he could get off liis clothes, all his 
 mental faculties, volition excepted, being perfect. On 
 
 ♦Joseph Guislain, Lecons orales sur Ics phrinof>athics (Paris. 1880), vol. I, 
 pp. 256, 479. See also Wilhelm GriesinKer, Traiti des yttalaJics uiftttalcs 
 (translated from the German by Dr. Doiimio, Paris, 1865), p. 86; Leubuscher, 
 Zcitzchri/t ftir Psychiatric, iv, 1847, " Ueber Abulie," pp. 5G2-578. 
 
 tE. Esquirol. Dcs maladies mcntalcs (Paris, 1838), i, 421. 
 
30 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 one occasion, having ordered a glass of water, it was 
 handed to him on a tray, but he could not take it, al- 
 though anxious to do so ; he kept a servant standing 
 before him half an hour before the obstruction was 
 overcome. It seemed to him, he said, * as if another 
 person had taken possession of his will.' "* 
 
 An author who must always be cited for the facts 
 of morbid psychology, Thomas De Quincey, has de- 
 scribed for us from his own experience this paralysis 
 of the will. The observation is so much the more val- 
 uable that it is due to a subtle mind and a skilful writer. 
 
 Owing to a prolonged abuse of opium he was com- 
 pelled to abandon studies that he had formerly fol- 
 lowed with great interest. He shrank from them with 
 a sense of powerlessness and infantine feebleness, with 
 an anguish so much the greater from remembering the 
 time when he had consecrated to them hours of delight. 
 One unfinished work to which he had given the best 
 of his intellect brought to him no longer aught but a 
 ''tomb of hopes defeated, of bailed efforts, of materials 
 useless]^ accumulated, of foundations laid that were 
 never to support a superstructure." In ''this state of 
 volitional but not intellectual weakness," he applied 
 himself to political economy, a stud}^ for which he had 
 been once eminently qualified. After having discov- 
 ered very many errors in the current doctrines, he 
 found in the treatise of Ricardo a satisfaction for his 
 intellectual thirst, and a pleasure and an activity which 
 for a long time he had not known. Thinking that some 
 important truths had, however, escaped the scrutinis- 
 ing eye of Ricardo, he conceived the project of a " Pro- 
 
 Prof. J. H. Bennett (on the authority of Sir Robert Christison), Tkc ^fes- 
 : Mania of iSsi, p. i6, cited by Carpenter, Mental Physiology/ (London 
 
 meric 
 
 1874), p. 385 
 
 f 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL. 31 
 
 legomena of Future Systems of Political Economy." 
 Arrangements were made for printing and publishing 
 the work, and it was twice announced. But he had to 
 write a preface and a dedication to Ricardo, and he 
 found himself entirely incapable of doing it ; so the 
 arrangements were countermanded and the work re- 
 mained on his table. 
 
 ''This state of intellectual torpor I experienced 
 more or less throughout the four years during which I 
 was under the Circean spells of opium. But for the 
 mental suffering I might indeed be said to have ex- 
 isted in a dormant state. I seldom could prevail upon 
 myself to write a letter : an answer of a few words to 
 any that I received was the utmost that I could accom- 
 plish, and often this not until the letter had lain weeks, 
 or even months, on my writing-table. Without the 
 aid of M., all records of bills paid or to be paid must 
 have perished, and my whole domestic economy — 
 whatever became of political economy — must have 
 gone into an irretrievable confusion. I shall not after- 
 wards allude to this part of the case. It is one, how- 
 ever, which the opium-eater will find in the end as 
 oppressing and tormenting as any 'other, from the 
 sense of incapacit}^ and feebleness, from the direct 
 embarrassment incident to the neglect or procrastina- 
 tion of each day's appropriate duties, and from the re- 
 morse which must often exasperate the stings of these 
 evils to a reflective and conscientious mind. 
 
 ''The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibili- 
 ties or aspirations ; he wishes and longs as earnestly 
 as ever to realise what he believes possible and feels 
 to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehen- 
 sion of what is profitable, infinitely outruns his power 
 not only of carrying out but even of attempting. He 
 
32 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL, 
 
 lies under the weight of incubus and nightmare ; he 
 Hes in sight of all that he would fain perform, just as 
 a man forcibly confined to his bed by the mortal lan- 
 guor of a relaxing disease who is compelled to witness 
 injury or outrage offered to some object of his tender- 
 est love : he curses the spells which chain him down 
 from motion ; he would lay down his life if he might 
 but get up and go out ; but he is powerless as an in- 
 fant and cannot even attempt to rise." * 
 
 I will close with one final observation — a little long, 
 the longest I know of, but one which will show the 
 malady under all its aspects. It is reported b}^ Billod 
 in the Annales medico-psychologiques. 
 
 It is the case of a man sixty-five years old, ''of a 
 strong constitution, lymphatic temperament, a well- 
 developed intellect, especially in all that concerns busi- 
 ness matters, and a moderate degree of sensitiveness." 
 Being very much attached to his profession of notary 
 it was only after long hesitations that he determined 
 upon selling his practice. Afterwards he fell into a 
 state of profound melancholy, refusing nourishment, 
 believing himself ruined, and pushing despair to the 
 point of an attempt at suicide. I neglect, in what fol- 
 lows, only some details which are purely medical or 
 without interest for us, and I permit the observer to 
 speak. 
 
 "The faculty which appeared to us the most seri- 
 ously impaired we do not hesitate to say was the will. 
 .... The patient frequently manifests an incapacity 
 of willing to execute certain acts, although he has the 
 desire to do so and his healthy judgment by a wise 
 liberation makes him see their expediency and often 
 even their necessity.'* 
 
 ■'t Confessions of an Opium Eattr (Boston, 1851), p. 106 et seq. 
 
.IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL. 33 
 
 He was confined in the asylum at Ivry; it was de- 
 cided that he should undertake with Air. Billod a trip 
 to Italy. 
 
 ''When his approaching departure was announced 
 to him, 'I shall never be able to/ he said, 'though I 
 find it dull here ; will I then remain all my life at 
 Ivry?' The day before starting, he announced anew 
 that he never could. On the day itself he arose at six 
 in the morning to go and make this declaration to Mr. 
 Mitivie. More or less resistance was therefore appre- 
 hended, but when I presented myself, he did not make 
 the least opposition ; only, as if he felt his will ready 
 to escape him, he said : ' Where is the cab ? let me hurry 
 and get into it.' 
 
 *' It would be idle to take the reader with us, and 
 make him a witness of all the phenomena presented 
 by the patient during this trip. These phenomena 
 may very well be resumed in three or four principal 
 ones that I shall give as a criterion of all the others. 
 
 **The first presented itself at Marseilles. The pa- 
 tient, before setting out, had to execute a power of 
 attorney to authorise his wife to sell a house. He draws 
 it up himself, copies it upon headed paper and pre- 
 pares to sign it, when there arises a difficulty upon 
 which we were far from counting. After having writ- 
 ten his name, it is utterly impossible for him to make 
 the paraph. There is question, it is true, of a com- 
 plicated paraph, but Mr. P. had always executed it 
 with ease. Vainly did the patient struggle with this 
 difficulty. A hundred times at least he makes with his 
 hand above the sheet of paper the movement neces- 
 sary to the act, which proves conclusively that the ob- 
 stacle is not in the hand ; a hundred times the restive 
 will is unable to command the fingers to apply the 
 
34 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL, ■ 
 
 pen to the paper. Mr. P. does his utmost ; he stands 
 up impatiently, stamps on the ground, then sits down 
 again and makes new attempts : the pen is still unable 
 to apply itself to the paper. Will any one deny here 
 that Mr. P. had an earnest desire to finish his signa- 
 ture, and that he understood the importance of this 
 act ? Will any one deny the integrity of the organ 
 charged with executing the paraph? It is evidently 
 impossible to deny it. The agent appears as sound 
 as the instrument ; but the first cannot bring itself to 
 bear upon the second. The will — that power by which 
 the hand should be set to performing the act conceived 
 and judged necessary by the intellect — is evidently 
 wanting. This struggle lasted three quarters of an 
 hour ; the succession of efforts ended at last in a result 
 of which I had despaired : the paraph was very im- 
 perfect, but it was executed. I Was witness of this 
 struggle ; I took the keenest interest in it, as the reader 
 may well imag'ine, and I testify that it would be impos- 
 sible to establish more clearly an incapacity of willing 
 in spite of a desire to do so.* 
 
 ''I observed some days afterwards an incapacit}^ of 
 the same kind. There was question of going out a 
 little after dinner. Mr. P. had the keenest desire to 
 do so ; he had wished, he said to me, to have an idea 
 of the appearance of the city. For five days in succes- 
 sion, he took his hat, arose and prepared to set out ; 
 but, vain hope, his will could not command his legs 
 to put themselves in motion in order to take him into 
 the street. . . . < Evidently I am my own prisoner,' 
 said the patient, < it is not you who prevent me from 
 going out, it is not my legs that oppose it ... . what 
 
 * I transcribe this observation literally, without any reflexion upon the 
 psychological doctrine of the author. 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WIIL. 35 
 
 is it then?' Mr. P. complained thus of not being able 
 to will, in spite of the wish that he had to do so. At 
 last, after five days, making a final effort, he succeeded 
 in going out, only to return five minutes afterwards 
 perspiring and panting as if he had been running sev- 
 eral kilometers, and very much astonished himself at 
 what he had just done. 
 
 " Instances of this incapacit}^ reappeared ever}' mo- 
 ment. If the patient had the desire of witnessing a 
 play, he could not will to go to it ; when at table among 
 amiable companions he would have wished to take part 
 in conversation, but the same powerlessness always 
 followed him. It is true that this impotence often ex- 
 isted onl}', so to speak, in apprehension ; the patient 
 feared that he would not be able, and yet succeeded 
 even more than he expected ; but often, too, it must 
 be said, his apprehension was justified." 
 
 After six days passed at Marseilles, the patient and 
 the doctor set off for Naples ; ''but it was not without 
 extraordinary difficulty." During these six days ''the 
 patient formally expressed a refusal to embark, and a 
 desire to return to Paris, being frightened in advance at 
 the idea of finding himself with his diseased will in a 
 foreign country, and declaring that it would be neces- 
 sary to handcuff him in order to take him. On the da}' 
 of departure he did not liiake up his mind to leave the 
 hotel until he believed me determined to resort to a 
 forcing apparatus ; and having gone out of the hotel 
 he stopped in the street, where he would doubtless 
 have remained if I h?ul not sent f(jr some seamen that 
 an employed of the packet-boat office had the kindness 
 to place at my disposition, who, however, needed only 
 to show themselves. . . . 
 
36 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL. 
 
 '^Another circumstance tends to bring out still more 
 the lesion of the will. We were at Rome, where we 
 arrived the very da}^ of the election of Pope Pius IX. 
 My patient said to me, 'This is a circumstance that I 
 would call fortunate, if I were not sick. I should like 
 to be able to witness the coronation ; . . . but I do not 
 know whether I can; I will try.' The day having 
 come, the patient rose at five o'clock in the morning, 
 took out his black coat from his trunk, shaved him- 
 self, etc., and said to me : 'You see, I am doing ver}^ 
 much, I do not yet know whether I shall be able to 
 go. ' At last, at the hour of the ceremony, he made a 
 great effort and succeeded with much difficulty in go- 
 ing down. But ten days afterwards, at the feast of 
 St. Peter, the same preparations and the same efforts 
 led to no result. 'You see well, ^ the patient said to 
 me, 'that I am still my own prisoner. It is not the 
 desire that is lacking to me, since I have been getting 
 ready for three hours ; here I am shaved, dressed, and 
 gloved, and yet I am no longer able to leave this 
 place.' 
 
 "In short, it was impossible for him to attend'the 
 ceremony. I had insisted very much, but I did not 
 think that I ought to compel him. 
 
 *' I will bring to an end this already rather extended 
 observation by a single remark : it is, that the instinc- 
 tive movements, the kind not subject, properly speak- 
 ing, to the will, were not impeded in our patient like 
 those which may be called directed. Thus, on arriving 
 at Lyons, upon our return, our mail-coach running over 
 a woman whom the horses had knocked down, my pa- 
 tient recovered all his energy, and, without waiting for 
 the carriage to stop, threw off his cloak, opened the 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL, 37 
 
 door, and was the first to descend to the woman's 
 side." 
 
 The author adds that the trip did not have the 
 efficacy that he expected ; that the patient felt better, 
 however, in a carriage, especially when it was hard 
 and the road bad ; and that he finally returned to his 
 famil}' in just about the same condition as at first.* 
 
 Tlie cases above cited represent a very definite 
 group. There spring from them some very clear facts 
 and some very probable inductions. Let us look, in 
 the first place, at the facts. 
 
 1. The muscular system and the organs of move- 
 ment are intact. From this side there is no impedi- 
 ment. The automatic activit}-, that which constitutes 
 the ordinary routine of life, persists. 
 
 2. The intelligence is perfect ; at least, nothing 
 authorises one to say that it has suffered the least im- 
 pairment. The end is clearly conceived, the means 
 likewise, but the transition to act is impossible. 
 
 Here, then, we have a disease of the will in the 
 most rigorous sense. We may remark in passing that 
 disease makes for us a curious experiment. It creates 
 exceptional conditions, which could not be produced 
 in any other way : it divides the man, annihilates the 
 individual reaction, leaves the rest intact; it produces 
 for us, so far as that is possible, a being reduced to 
 pure intelligence. 
 
 Whence comes this impotence of the will? Here 
 the inductions begin. There are only two hypotheses 
 possible regarding its immediate cause ; it consists in 
 
 *.Dr. E. Billod, " Maladies de la volontc," part ii, in Anval.s >n^</i,o-f>sy- 
 chologiques, vol. x, p. 172 et seq. The author cites several other cases of a 
 much less clear character, which we shall not describe (see pp, 184, 319, et 
 «eq.) 
 
38 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 an impairment either of the motor centres ''' or of the 
 incitations that they receive. 
 
 Let us examine these two hypotheses, beginning 
 with the second, which seems to me the more plaus- 
 ible. 
 
 Esquirol has preserved for us the remarkable an- 
 swer that a patient made to him after he had been 
 cured. ''This lack of activit}^ arose from the fact that 
 my sensations were too weak to exert an influence 
 upon my will." The same author has also noted the 
 profound change that these patients experience in their 
 general sense of life. "My existence," one of them 
 writes to him, ''is incomplete ; the functions and acts 
 of ordinary life have remained to me, but in each of 
 them there is something lacking, to wit, tJie sensatio^i 
 which is propel' to tJiem and the joy which follows them. 
 . . . Each one of my senses, each part of m3^self, is, 
 so to speak, separated from me, and can no longer 
 procure for me any sensation." Would a psychologist 
 better express to what degree the affective life is 
 stricken, in that which is most general in it? 
 
 Billod reports the case of a young Italian woman 
 "of brilliant education," who, having become insane 
 through disappointment in love, was healed, but only 
 to fall into a profound apathy regarding everything. 
 "She reasons soundly upon all subjects, but she no 
 longer has any will, in the proper sense of the word, 
 neither power to will or to love, nor consciousness of 
 what happens to her, of what she feels, or of what she 
 does. . . . She says that she finds herself in the state 
 of one who is neither dead nor alive, who lives in a 
 
 * We would remark that there is question of the condition, not of the mo- 
 tor organs, but of the centres, whatever opinion may be held regarding their 
 nature and localisation. 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL. 39 
 
 perpetual sleep, to whom objects appear as though 
 wrapped in a cloud, and to whom persons seem to 
 move about like shadows, and words to come from a 
 distant world."* 
 
 If, as we shall see at length later on, the voluntary 
 act is composed of two very distinct elements : a state 
 of consciousness totally impotent to cause or prevent 
 action, and organic states which alone have this power; 
 it must be admitted that the two events, ordinarily 
 simultaneous because they are the effects of the same 
 cause, are here disassociated. The inability to act is 
 a fact. Is the intensity of the state of consciousness 
 (which, in any case, is intermittent) also a fact? In 
 that case it would be necessary to admit that the neces- 
 sary and sufficient conditions occur, but for this event 
 alone. Is it an illusion ? I am inclined to think that 
 it is. The ardent desire to act, that some of these 
 patients believe themselves to experience, appears to 
 me a simple illusion of their consciousness. The in- 
 tensity of a desire is something entirely relative. In 
 that state of general apathy, a given impulse that ap- 
 pears strong to them is in fact below the mean inten- 
 sity; whence the inaction. In stud3'ing the state of the 
 will in somnambulism, we shall see later on that certain 
 subjects are persuaded tliat it depends wholly upon 
 themselves to act, but that they are finally compelled 
 by experience to admit tliat tliey are wrong and that 
 their consciousness deceives them completely. f 
 
 On the contrary, when an excitation is very vio- 
 lent, sudden and unexpected, that is to say, unites all 
 the conditions of intensity, it most frequently acts. We 
 
 ♦ Billod, Annates midico-psychologiques , loc. cit., p. 184. 
 t See Chapter V, infra. 
 
40 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL, 
 
 have seen, above, a patient recover his energy to save 
 a woman who had been run over.* 
 
 Each one of us can, moreover, picture to himself 
 this state of abulia ; for there is no one who has not 
 been through hours of dejection in which all incite- 
 ments, exterior and interior, sensations and ideas, re- 
 main inoperant, leave us cold. It is a touch of abulia. 
 There is only the difference between a less and a 
 greater, between a transient condition and a chronic 
 state. 
 
 If these patients cannot will, it is because all the 
 projects they conceive awaken in them but feeble de- 
 sires, insufficient to impel them to action. I express 
 myself thus in order to conform to the current phrase- 
 ology; for it is not the w^eakness of the desires, con- 
 sidered as simple psychic states, which induces the in- 
 action. That would be to reason from appearances 
 only. As we have shown above, every state of the ner- 
 vous system, corresponding to a sensation or an idea, 
 expresses itself so much the better in movement as it 
 is accompanied by those other neural states, whatever 
 they may be, which correspond to feelings. It is from 
 the weakness of these states that abulia results, not 
 from the weakness of the desires, which is only a sign. 
 
 The cause is then a relative insensibility, a general 
 impairment of sensibility; what is attacked is the emo- 
 tional life, the possibility of being moved. Whence 
 does this morbid state itself come? The problem is 
 chiefly of a physiological order. Beyond doubt there 
 is in patients of this class a notable depression of the 
 vital activities. It may reach such a point that all the 
 faculties are affected and the individual becomes an 
 
 * I have learned from Dr. Billed that this patient recovered his activity in 
 consequence of the events of June, 1848, and the emotions they caused him. 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE UTIL. 41 
 
 inert thing. This is the state that the physicians desig- 
 nate by the names of melanchoHa, lypemania, and 
 stupor, whose physical symptoms are a slackening of 
 the circulation, a lowering of the temperature of the 
 body, and an almost complete immobility. These ex- 
 treme cases go beyond our subject ; but they reveal to 
 us the ultimate causes of the impotences of the wilL 
 Every depression in the vital tone, slight or profound, 
 fugitive or lasting, has its effect. The will so little re- 
 sembles a faculty reigning as a mistress that it depends 
 at each instant upon the most trivial and hidden causes; 
 it is at their mercy. And yet, as it has its source in 
 the biological processes that take place in the inmost 
 depths of our tissues, we see how true it is to say that 
 it is our very self. 
 
 We ma}' venture another h3'pothesis and seek the 
 explanation of abulia in the order of motor manifesta- 
 tions. Between the resolution which expresses itself 
 by an ''I will," and which is a purely mental act, and 
 the execution of the movements willed, which is a 
 purely physical act, there is an intermediate stage 
 which is the awakening and excitation of the motor 
 images. All our movements, executed at first at ran- 
 dom, leave after them traces, residua, which constitute 
 a motor memor}', thanks to which, after a period of 
 gropings and apprenticeship, the will, become mistress 
 of its instrument, has only to speak to be obe)cd. 
 Might it not be supposed that these motor images are 
 impaired or lost and that as a result the will remains 
 suspended in a void and impotent to pass into action? 
 As specious as this hypothesis may be, it is not ten- 
 able. It would be equivalent to saying that these dis- 
 eases of the will are diseases of the memory; but abulia 
 is not a kind of amnesia. The agraphia patient who, 
 
42 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL, 
 
 through loss of the motor images, no longer knows 
 how to write, totally differs from Billod's patient who, 
 as soon as he succeeds in acting, writes like any one 
 else. 
 
 It would be more permissible to associate abulia 
 with the psychic paj^aiyses studied by Reynolds, Charcot, 
 and other authors. In cases of this kind, the patient 
 is paralysed because he believes himself paralysed. 
 The whole treatment consists in extirpating from his 
 mind this debilitating image. As soon as he believes 
 himself able to act he acts.* Yet, does this not bring 
 us back indirectly to the first hypothesis? For how can 
 the idea of a motor impotence act except through the 
 state of depression which accompanies it, that is to say, 
 through a diminishing of excitation. 
 
 The reader may choose between the two hypotheses 
 which have been propounded ; our preferences are for 
 the first one.f 
 
 II. 
 
 The second group resembles the first in its effects 
 (enfeeblement of the will) and in its causes (depressive 
 influences). The only difference is that the incitation 
 to act is not extinct. The first grou.p presents positive 
 causes of inaction, the second group negative causes. 
 The inhibition results from an antagonism. 
 
 In all of the observations which are to follow, the 
 impairment of the will arises from a sentiment of fear, 
 without a reasonable motive, which varies from simple 
 
 * These psychical paralyses can bo produced by suggestions in the hyp- 
 notic state. One can paralyse the organs of speech, an arm, a leg, etc. An 
 afiSrmation creates the infirmities, the contrary affirmation destroys them. 
 
 t For a very detailed study of a case of abulia (mania of doubt) see the 
 articles by Mr. Pierre Janet, in the Revue phi'losophiqiic, March and April, 
 1891. That author explains it by a " psychic disintegration." 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL. 43 
 
 anxiety to anguish and stupefying terror. The intel- 
 lect appears intact in certain cases, impaired in others. 
 So some of these cases are of a doubtful character, and 
 it is difficult to say whether they denote a malady of 
 the will alone.* 
 
 The following observation makes the transition 
 from one group to the other ; to tell the truth it belongs 
 to both. 
 
 A man thirty years of age finds himself mixed up 
 in riots which cause him a great fright. Thereafter, 
 although he has preserved his perfect lucidity of mind, 
 although he administers his fortune very well and directs 
 an important business, '' he cannot remain alone, either 
 in the street or in his room ; he is always accom- 
 panied. When he is away from home it would be im- 
 possible for him to return alone to his domicile. If he 
 does go out alone, which very rarely occurs, he soon 
 stops in the middle of the street, and would remain 
 there indefinitely, without going either forwards or 
 backwards, if some one did not bring him back. He 
 appears to have a will, but it is that of the people who 
 surround him! When one desires to overcome this re- 
 sistance of the patient, he falls into a swoon, "f 
 
 Several alienists have recently described under the 
 names of fear of spaces, fear of places (Plaizangsi), and 
 agoraphobia, a fantastic anxiety which paralyses the 
 will, and against which the individual is powerless to 
 react, or succeeds in doing so only by indirect means. 
 
 An observation by Westphal may serve as a type. 
 
 ♦ It is well to remark once for all that, stiidying here only the disorders 
 exclusively characteristic of the will, w.; have had to eliminate the cases 
 where the psychic activity is affected in its totality, and those in which de- 
 rangements of the will are only the effect and the manifestation of intellectual 
 insanity. 
 
 t Billod, loc. cit., p. iDi 
 
44 THE DISEASES OF THE WILE 
 
 A robust traveller, perfectly healthy in niind and pre- 
 senting no disturbance of motility, finds himself seized 
 with a sense of anguish at the sight of a public place or 
 of a space of any considerable extent. If he has to cross 
 one of the great squares of Berlin, he has the feeling 
 that the distance is one of several miles, and that he 
 will never be able to reach the other side. This emo- 
 tion diminishes or disappears if he goes around the 
 square following the houses, or if he is accompanied, 
 or even if he simply supports himself upon a cane. 
 
 Carpenter reports, after Bennett,* a ''paralysis of 
 the will," which seems to me of the same order. 
 "When a certain man took a walk in the street and 
 came to some break in the line of houses, he was un- 
 able to go on any further ; his will became suddenly 
 inactive. The encountering of a square never failed 
 to stop him. To cross a street was also something very 
 difficult, and when he passed the threshold of a door 
 in entering or going out he was always arrested for 
 some minutes." 
 
 Others, in the open country, feel at ease only when 
 walking beside bushes or under the shelter of the trees. 
 Examples might be multiplied, but without profit, as 
 the fundamental fact remains the same.f 
 
 The medical discussions regarding this morbid state 
 do not concern us here. The psychological fact re- 
 duces itself to a feeling of fear, like so many others 
 that are met with, and it is indifferent that this feeling 
 is puerile and chimerical as regards its causes ; we 
 
 * Loc. cit., p. 385. 
 
 + For further details, see Westphal, Archiv fur Psychiatric, vol. iii (two 
 articles); Cordes, ibid.; Legrand du Saulle, Annalcs }ucdicopsychologiques^ 
 1876, p. 405, with a discussion of this subject ; Ritti, Dictiotitiairc cncyclopSdique 
 lies sciences ntcdicales. article " Folie avec conscience "; Maudsley, Pathology 
 of Mind (French translation, p. 339, seq.). • 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL. 45 
 
 have only to note its effect, which is to hinder voh- 
 tion. But we must inquire whether this depressive 
 influence merely arrests the volitional impulse, which 
 remains intact in itself, or whether the power of indi- 
 vidual reaction is also impaired. The second hypoth- 
 esis imposes itself upon us, for the feeling of fear not 
 being insurmountable (as these patients prove in cer- 
 tain cases) it must be admitted that the individual's 
 power of reaction has fallen below the general level ; 
 in such wise that the arrest results from two causes 
 which act in the same direction. 
 
 Unfortunately the physiological conditions of this 
 impairment are not known. Numerous conjectures 
 have been made. Cordes, himself stricken with this 
 infirmity, considers it ''afunctional paralysis, symp- 
 tomatic of certain modifications of the motor centres, 
 and capable of giving rise to certain impressions within 
 us. Specifically, it would be an impression of fear 
 which would give rise to a transient paralysis ; an effect 
 almost null if the imagination alone comes into play, 
 but carried to the highest degree by the adjunction of 
 accessory circumstances." The primitive cause would 
 be then *'a paretic exhaustion of the motor nervous 
 system, of that portion of the brain which presides 
 not only over locomotion but also over muscular sensi- 
 bility." 
 
 This explanation, if it were well established, would 
 be of great importance to our subject. It would show 
 that tlie impotence of the will depends upon an im- 
 potence of the motor centres, which would have the 
 advantage of giving to our researches a secure physio- 
 logical basis. But it would be premature to draw here 
 conclusions whi( h would be better placed at the end 
 of our work. 
 
46 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL, 
 
 I shall not speak at length regarding the mental 
 state called doubting-insanity or fumbling-mania(6^/'2^"- 
 belsuchf). It represents the pathological form of the 
 irresolute character, just as abulia is that of the apa- 
 thetic character. It is a state of constant hesitation 
 from the most trivial motives, with inability to reach 
 any definitive result. 
 
 The hesitation exists at first in the purely intellec- 
 tual order. The patient asks himself endless ques- 
 tions. I borrow an example from Legrand du Saulle. 
 *^A very intelligent woman cannot go out in the street 
 without asking herself : 'Is some one going to fall out 
 of a window at my feet? Will it be a man or a wo- 
 man? .Will the person be wounded or killed? If 
 wounded, will it be in the head or the legs? Will 
 there be blood on the sidewalk ? If the person is killed 
 how shall I know it ? Ought I to call for help, or to 
 run away, or to recite a prayer ? Shall I be accused 
 of being the cause of this occurrence? Will ni}^ inno- 
 cence be recognised? ' and soon." These interroga- 
 tions continue without end, and there exist a great 
 number of analogous cases, recorded in special treat- 
 ises.* 
 
 If there were nothing more than this ''psychological 
 rumination," as the author cited expresses it, we should 
 have nothing to say regarding it ; but this morbid per- 
 plexity of the intellect expresses itself in the actions. 
 The patient no longer dares to do anything without 
 endless precautions. If he writes a letter, he reads it 
 over several times, for fear he may have forgotten a 
 word or offended against orthography. 
 
 ♦ Consult in particular: Legrand du Saulle, La foUe du doute avec delire 
 du toucher, 1875; Griesinger, Arckiv fiir Psychiatrie, 1869; Berger, ibid., 1876; 
 Kitti, Dictionnaire encyclopidique^ loc. cit. 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL. 47 
 
 If he is shutting up a piece of furniture he verifies 
 several times over the success of his operation. In 
 the same way for his apartment ; there is a repeated 
 verification of the fastenings, of the presence of the 
 key in his pocket, of the state of his pocket, etc. 
 
 In a graver form, the patient, pursued by a puerile 
 fear of dirtiness or unwholesome contact, no longer 
 dares to touch pieces of money, door-knobs, window- 
 fastenings, etc., and lives amid perpetual apprehen- 
 sions. Such was the cathedral beadle mentioned by 
 Morel, who, worried for twenty-five years by absurd 
 fears, no longer dares to touch his halberd, reasons 
 with himself, rails at himself, and triumphs over him- 
 self, but by a sacrifice that he is apprehensive of being 
 unable to make the next time.* 
 
 This malady of the will results in part from weak- 
 ness of character, in part from the intellectual state. 
 It is quite natural that this flux of chimerical ideas 
 should express itself in useless acts, not adapted to 
 reality; but the impotence of the individual reaction 
 plays an important role. So we find a lowering of the 
 vital tone. The proof of this is to be found in the 
 causes of this morbid state (hereditary neuropathies, 
 debilitating maladies); in the crises and the s}'ncope 
 to which the effort to act may lead ; and in the ex- 
 treme forms of the disease where these miserable per- 
 sons, consumed by hesitations without respite, no 
 longer write, no longer listen, no longer speak, *'but 
 talk to themselves in a low voice, then in an under- 
 tone, and in some cases end by simply moving the 
 lips, expressing their ideas by a sort of murmur (///// ,v- 
 sitation). 
 
 Finally, let us note the cases in which the impair- 
 
 * Archives giniraUx de midtcine, 1866. 
 
48 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL, 
 
 ment of the will borders on extinction. When a per- 
 manent and obtrusive state of consciousness is accom- 
 panied by a feeling of intense terror, there occurs an 
 almost absolute inhibition, and the patient appears 
 stupid without being so. Of this character is the case 
 reported by Esquirol of a young man who appeared to 
 be an idiot, who had to be dressed, put to bed, and 
 fed, and who, after his recovery, acknowledged that 
 an interior voice used to say to him : ''Do not move, 
 or you are dead." * 
 
 Guislain also reports a curious fact, but one in 
 which the absence of psychological data leaves us in a 
 quandary and permits only an equivocal interpreta- 
 tion. ''A young lady, courted by a young man, was 
 seized with a mental alienation, whose true cause was 
 unknown and whose distinctive feature was a strong 
 contrariness of disposition, which was soon transformed 
 into a morbid mutism. During twelve years she made 
 answer to questions only twice ; the first time, under 
 the influence of her father's imperative words ; the 
 second, on her entrance into our establishment. In 
 both cases she was strangely, surprisingly laconic." 
 
 For two months Guislain devoted himself to re- 
 peated attempts to effect a cure. "My efforts were 
 vain and my exhortations without effect. I persisted, 
 and very soon I noticed a change in the features, a 
 more intelligent expression in the e3'es ; a little later 
 she would utter from time to time some sentences, 
 clear, categorical explanations, interrupted by long in- 
 tervals of silence ; for the patient showed an extreme 
 repugnance to yielding to my entreaties. ... It could 
 be seen that each time her self-love was gratified by 
 the victory that she obtained over herself. In her an- 
 
 ♦ Esquirol, vol. ii, p. 287. 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL. 49 
 
 swers there could never be observed the shghtest in- 
 sane idea ; her ahenation was exclusively a malady of 
 the impulsive will. Often a sort of bashfulness seemed 
 to restrain this patient, whom I began to consider as 
 decidedly convalescent. For two or three da3-s she 
 ceased to speak ; then, as a result of renewed solicita- 
 tions, speech returned to her again, until at last she 
 took part, of her own accord, in the conversations go- 
 ing on around her. . . . This recovery is one of the 
 most astonishing that I have seen in my life."* 
 
 The author adds that the restoration was complete 
 and lasting. 
 
 This state of morbid inertia, of which abulia is the 
 type, where the '*I will" is never followed by action, 
 shows that volition, considered as a state of conscious- 
 ness, and the efficient power of acting are two distinct 
 things. Without insisting for the moment on this 
 point, let us dwell upon this fact of effort, which is of 
 prime importance in the psychology of the will, and 
 which is lacking here. 
 
 The feeling of muscular effort has been studied by 
 Mr. William Jamesf in a manner so profound and so 
 rigorous that there is no need of going over it again, 
 and it is sufficient to recall briefly his conclusions. 
 That physiologist has shown that the sense of the mus- 
 cular energy expended in any act whatever is *'a com- 
 plex afferent sensation, which comes from the con- 
 tracted muscles, the tense ligaments, the compressed 
 articulations, the firm chest, the closed glottis, the 
 contracted eye-brow, the set jaws, etc." lie has dis- 
 cussed, point by point, sn]:)porting himself on the results 
 of experiment, the oj)inion which makes of it an cffer- 
 
 •Guislain. op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 227. 228. 
 t The Fcelins of Effort, Boston, 1880. 
 
50 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 ent sensation, connected with the motor discharge and 
 coinciding with the outgoing current of nervous energy. 
 He has notably shown, after Ferrier and others, how, 
 in cases of paralysis, if the sense of effort is preserved, 
 although the paralysed member cannot be moved in 
 the slightest degree, it is because the conditions of the 
 consciousness of effort continue to exist, the patient 
 moving the member or organ of the opposite side. 
 
 But Mr. James rightly distinguishes the muscular 
 from the volitional effort, which latter, in many cases, 
 implies no immediate movement or no more than 
 an extremely feeble muscular energy. Such, to bor- 
 row from him one of his illustrations, is the case of 
 the man, who, after a long hesitation, decides to put 
 arsenic into his wife's glass in order to poison her. 
 Every one knows moreover by his own experience this 
 state of struggle in which the effort is all internal. 
 Here we take issue with regret from that author, who 
 locates this effort in a region apart and supersensible. 
 To us it seems to differ from the other only in one 
 point : its physiological conditions are little known, 
 and only hypotheses can be ventured. 
 
 There are two types of this volitional effort : one 
 which consists in arresting the movements of instinct, 
 or passion, or habit ; the other, in overcoming languor, 
 torpor, or timidity; the first is an effort with a nega- 
 tive result, the other, an effort with a positive result ; 
 one produces an inhibition, the other an impulsion. 
 These two t3'pes can themselves be reduced to a single 
 formula. There is effort when the volition follows the 
 line of greatest resistance. This volitional effort never 
 takes place when the impulse (or inhibition) and the 
 choice coincide, when our natural tendencies and the 
 ''I will" go in the same direction; in clearer terms, 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE Will. 51 
 
 when what is immediately agreeable to the individual 
 and what is chosen by him are but one. It always 
 occurs when two groups of antagonistic tendencies are 
 struggling each to supplant the other. In fact, as 
 every one knows, this struggle takes place between 
 the lower tendencies, whose adaptation is limited, and 
 the higher tendencies, whose adaptation is complex. 
 The first are always the stronger by nature ; the sec- 
 ond are sometimes so by art. The first represent a 
 power enregistered in the organism, the others an ac- 
 quisition of recent date. 
 
 How, then, can these sometimes triumph? It is 
 because the "■ I will " is a reinforcement for them. Not, 
 of course, as a simple state of consciousness, but be- 
 cause, under this volition, which is an effect, there are 
 causes, known, partly known, and unknown, which we 
 have so often summed up in one word : the individual 
 character. All these little active causes which cqiisti- 
 tute the physical and psychic individual are not ab- 
 stractions. They are physiological or ps3xho-physio- 
 logical processes : they presuppose work done in the 
 nervous centres, whatever they may be. Is it rash to 
 maintain that the sense of volitional effort is itself also 
 an effect of these physiological processes ? The only 
 objection that can be made is our present inability to 
 determine its mechanism. This point is all the more 
 obscure because the mechanism must differ according 
 as it is an impulse or an inhibition that is to be pro- 
 duced : so the feeling of volitional effort is not identi- 
 cal in the two cases. 
 
 The inward struggle is accompanied by a feeling of 
 fatigue often intense. Altliough we do not know all 
 about the nature and causes of this state, it is generally 
 supposed that even in muscular effort the seat of the 
 
52 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL. 
 
 fatigue is in the neural centres which direct the con- 
 traction, not in the muscles ; that there is a nervous, 
 not a muscular, exhaustion. In reflex contractions 
 there is no fatigue perceived. In hysterical persons, 
 contractions are seen to persist almost indefinitely, 
 without the patient experiencing the least sense of 
 lassitude ; it is then the voluntary effort which wearies, 
 and not the contraction of the muscle.* 
 
 We have, therefore, no reason except our ignorance 
 for attributing to volitional effort a character apart. 
 Are the neural elements capable of furnishing, in all 
 the cases where this effort must go forth, an increase 
 of work during a given period? or else are they, by 
 nature or by lack of education and exercise, quickly 
 exhausted and incapable of regaining new strength? 
 Have they, or have they not, a sufficient quantity of 
 disponible force stored up in them? The problem of 
 action in the direction of the greatest resistance is there 
 reduced to its lowest terms. It is this hidden, almost 
 unknown labor which manifests itself in the feeling of 
 volitional effort. The feeling of effort in all its forms 
 is, accordingly, a subjective state corresponding to 
 certain operations going on in the nerve-centres and 
 other parts of the organism, but resembling them as 
 little as the sensations of sound and of light resemble 
 their objective cause. To produce a great moral or 
 intellectual effort, it is necessary for the appropriate 
 nerve-centres (whatever they may be, and our igno- 
 rance on this point is almost complete) to be in a state 
 to perform intense and repeated work, instead of be- 
 coming exhausted at short notice and without recupera- 
 
 * Richet, Physiologic des nerfs et dcs muscles, pp. 477-490. Delboeuf, " Etude 
 psychophysique," p. 92 et seq.,iD Elements de psychophysigue, vol. i. 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE JVIIL. 53 
 
 tive power. The capacity for effort is, therefore, in 
 the last analysis a natural gift. 
 
 To be less indefinite, let us take the commonplace 
 example of a vicious man. If he has never in his life, 
 either spontaneously or under the influence of others, 
 experienced even the faintest desire for conversion (sup- 
 posing that such a case occurs), it is because the moral 
 elements, with the corresponding physiological condi- 
 tions, are completely lacking in him. If, under any 
 circumstances, the idea of amendment rises up in him, 
 we may remark in the first place that this occurrence 
 is involuntary; but it supposes the pre-existence and 
 the calling into play of certain psycho-physiological 
 elements. Should this end be chosen, affirmed as hav- 
 ing ought to be, willed ; if the resolution docs not last 
 it is because the individual is incapable of effort ; it is 
 because there is not in his organisation the possibility 
 of repeated work of which we have spoken ; if it does 
 last, it is because it is maintained by virtue of effort, 
 by that interior labor which produces the inhibition of 
 contrary states. Every organ develops by exercise ; 
 it is the same here, in such wise that repetition be- 
 comes easier. But if a first element is not given by 
 nature, and with it a potential energy, nothing re- 
 sults. The theological dogma of grace as a free gift 
 appears to us, therefore, founded upon a much more 
 e.xact psychology than the contrary opinion,* and we 
 see how easily it may be made to undergo a physio- 
 logical transformation. To return to the morbid cases 
 with which we arc dealing, there must be an incapa- 
 city for effort, temporary and accidental, but extending 
 to almost the entire organism. 
 
 *Thf? doctrine of grace is already met with amonR the Hindus, notably in 
 the Bhagavad-Gitil, xi, 53. See Darth, The Religions 0/ India, 75, 219. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL. II. EXCESS OF 
 IMPULSE. * 
 
 We have just been looking at cases in which the 
 intellectual adaptation, that is to say, the correspond- 
 ence between the intelligent being and the environ- 
 ment, being normal, the impulse to action is absent, 
 very weak, or at least insufficient. In physiological 
 language, the cerebral acts which are the basis of the 
 intellectual . activity (the concept of an end and of 
 means, choice, etc.) remain intact, but there is lacking 
 to them those concomitant states which are the physio- 
 logical equivalents of the feelings, and whose absence 
 occasions the defect of action. 
 
 We are about to witness cases contrary to the pre- 
 ceding in certain respects. The intellectual adapta- 
 tion is very weak, at least very unstable ; rational mo- 
 tives are powerless to act or restrain from action ; the 
 impulses of an inferior order gain all that the higher 
 impulses lose. The will, that is to say, the rational 
 activity, disappears, and the individual falls back into 
 the domain of instinct. 
 
 There are no examples which can better show us 
 that the will, in the exact sense, is the crown, the last 
 term of an evolution, the result of a great number of 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL. 55 
 
 tendencies disciplined in accordance with an hierarchic 
 order; that it is the most perfect species of that genus 
 which is called activity; in such wise that the study 
 which is to follow might be entitled : How the will be- 
 comes impoverished and disappears. 
 
 Let us examine the facts. We will divide them into 
 two groups : (i) those which, being hardly conscious 
 (even if they are so at all), denote an absence rather 
 than an enfeeblement of the will ; (2) those which are 
 accompanied by full consciousness, but in which, after 
 a longer or shorter struggle, the will succumbs or only 
 recovers itself l)y outside assistance. 
 
 I. In the first case ''the impulse may be sudden, 
 unconscious, followed by an immediate execution, 
 without the understanding having even had time to 
 take cognisance of it. . . . The act has then all the 
 characteristics of a purely reflex phenomenon which 
 takes place inevitably, without any connivance of the 
 will. It is a true convulsion which differs from the 
 ordinary convulsion only because it consists of move- 
 ments associated and combined in view of a determined 
 result. Such is the case of that woman who, seated 
 on a bench in a garden, in an unaccustomed state of 
 causeless sadness, gets up suddenly, throws herself into 
 a ditch full of water as if to drown herself, and who, 
 saved and restored to perfect lucidity, declares, a few 
 days after, that she is not aware of having wished to 
 commit suicide, nor has she any remembrance of the 
 attempt that she has made." * 
 
 *' I have seen," says Luys,t *'a number of patients 
 
 * Fovillc, Nouveau dictionnaire de medicine, article " Folic," p. 342. 
 t This citation is given in the earlier French editions, though omitted in 
 the later ovit%.— Trans. 
 
56 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 who repeatedly attempted suicide in the presence of 
 those who watched them, but they had no recollection 
 of the fact in their lucid state. And what proves the 
 unconsciousness of the mind under these conditions is 
 the fact that the patients do not perceive the inefficacy 
 of the methods they employ. Thus a lady who at- 
 tempted suicide whenever she saw a table-knife, did 
 not notice one day when I was watching her that I 
 had substituted for the knife a harmless instrument. 
 Another patient tried to hang himself with a half-rotten 
 cord that was not strong enough to bear even slight 
 tension." * 
 
 Among epileptics, impulses of this kind are so fre- 
 quent that pages might be filled with them. Hysterical 
 patients would also furnish innumerable examples ; 
 they have a frantic tendency to the immediate satis- 
 faction of their caprices or of their wants. 
 
 Other impulses have effects less grave, but denote 
 the same psychic state. '' In certain patients, the sur- 
 excitation of the motor forces is such that they walk 
 for whole hours without stopping, without looking 
 around them, like mechanical apperatus that have been 
 set in motion." A marchioness of a very distinguished 
 mind, says Billod, in the middle of a conversation 
 ''interrupts a sentence that she afterwards goes on 
 with, in order to address to some one in the company 
 an improper or obscene epithet. The utterance of this 
 word is accompanied with blushing, with a confused 
 and abashed air, and the word is spoken in an abrupt 
 tone like an arrow leaving the string." An hysterical 
 patient of long standing, very intelligent and ver}^ lucid, 
 "experiences at certain moments the need of going into 
 some solitary place to shout ; she unburdens her griefs, 
 
 * Maladies mentales, pp. 373, 439, 440. 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE Will. 57 
 
 her complaints against her family and her environment. 
 She knows perfectly well that she is wrong to divulge 
 certain secrets aloud ; but, as she insists, she is com- 
 pelled to speak and satisfy her grudges." * 
 
 This last case leads us to the irresistible impulses 
 with consciousness. Confining ourselves to the others, 
 that we could multiply to profusion, they show us the 
 individual reduced to the lowest degree of activity, 
 that of pure reflexes. The acts are unconscious (at 
 any rate not deliberate), immediate, irresistible, with 
 an adaptation invariable and of little complexity. From 
 the point of view of physiology and of psychology, 
 the human being under these conditions is compara- 
 ble to an animal which has been decapitated or at 
 least deprived of its cerebral lobes. It is generally 
 admitted that the brain can dominate the reflexes for 
 the following reason : the excitation, starting from one 
 point in the body, divides its self on its arrival in the 
 spinal cord and follows two paths ; it is transmitted 
 to the reflex centre by a transverse route ; to the brain 
 by a longitudinal and ascending one. The transverse 
 route offering more resistance, transmission in this di- 
 rection requires a rather long time (experiment of Ro- 
 senthal). The lengthwise transmission is, on the con- 
 trary, much more rapid. The suspensive action of the 
 brain consequently has time to take place and to mod- 
 erate the reflexes. In the foregoing cases, the brain 
 being without action, the activity remains in its inferior 
 degree, and, in default of its necessary and suflicient 
 conditions, volition is not produced. 
 
 II. The facts of the second group deserve to be 
 studied at greater lengtli : they bring out the defect of 
 the will or the artificial means which maintain it. Here 
 
 • Billed, loc. cit., 193 seqq. 
 
58 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL. 
 
 the patient has full consciousness of the situation ; he 
 feels that he is no more master of himself, that he is 
 dominated by an interior force, irresistibly impelled to 
 commit acts that he reprobates. The intellect remains 
 sufficiently healthy, the madness exists only in the acts. 
 
 The most simple form is that oi fixed ideas with ob- 
 session. Such a one cannot deliver himself from the 
 invincible necessity of counting, without end or repose, 
 all that he sees and touches, all the words that he reads 
 or hears, all the letters of a book, etc. (arithmomania). 
 He is conscious of the absurdity of this labor, but he 
 must count. Another is obsessed with an implacable 
 need of knowing the name of all the unknown per- 
 sons that he meets in the streets or while travelling 
 (onomatomania of Charcot and Magnan). He tries in 
 vain to escape from this puerile inquisitiveness ; he 
 mtist know them. 
 
 These obsessions, and analogous ones that I omit, 
 have at least one advantage. As they have their origin 
 in intellectual states, pure ideas (not wants or feelings), 
 their satisfaction is without danger. 
 
 All this, even in action, remains theoretical, spec- 
 ulative. 
 
 It is quite otherwise with the irresistible impulses 
 of affective origin, springing from needs and instincts, 
 of which we are about to speak. 
 
 There will be found in a book by Marc, now some- 
 what forgotten,* an ample collection of facts upon 
 which later writers have often drawn. Let us cite a 
 few of them. 
 
 A lady sometimes attacked with homicidal im- 
 pulses used to ask to be restrained by means of a strait 
 
 *De la folic consideree dans ces rapports avec Us questions medico-judiciaires 
 (2 vol. 8vo., Paris, 1840). 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL. 59 
 
 jacket, announcing afterwards the moment when all 
 danger was past and when her liberty of movement 
 could be restored. 
 
 A chemist tormented in the same way by homicidal 
 desires caused his two thumbs to be tied together with 
 a ribbon, and found in this simple obstacle the means 
 of resisting the temptation. 
 
 A domestic of irreproachable conduct begged her 
 mistress to let her go away, because when she saw 
 naked the child of which she had charge, she was de- 
 voured with a desire to disembowel it. 
 
 Another woman, of great intellectual culture and full 
 of affection for her parents, "began to strike them in 
 spite of herself and asked some one to come to her aid 
 by holding her in an arm-chair." 
 
 A melancholic patient tormented with the idea of 
 .suicide got up at night, went and knocked at his 
 brother's door and cried to him : ''Come quickly, sui- 
 cide pursues mc, very soon I shall no longer resist." * 
 
 Calmeil, in his ''Traits des maladies inflammatoires 
 du cerveau," reports the following case, of which he 
 was a witness and which I will report at full length 
 because it will dispense me from many others : 
 
 *'G16nadel, having lost his father in infancy, was 
 raised by his mother who adored him. At sixteen years 
 his character, until then good and submissive, changed. 
 He became sombre and taciturn. Pressed with ques- 
 tions by his mother, he at last decided upon an 
 avowal: 'I owe everything to you,* he said to her, 
 * I love you with all my soul ; however, for some days 
 an incessant idea has impelled me to kill you. Do not 
 let it happen, that, I being at last vanquished, so great 
 a misfortune shall take place ; let me enlist.' In spite 
 
 *Quislain, op. cit., i, 479. 
 
6o THE DISEASES OF THE WILL, 
 
 of pressing solicitations, he was immovable in his reso- 
 lution, went away and was a good soldier. How- 
 ever, a secret will continually urged him to desert, so 
 as to return to the country and kill his mother. At 
 the end of his engagement, the idea was as strong as 
 on the first day. He contracted a new engagement. 
 The homicidal instinct persisted, but accepted the sub- 
 stitution of another victim. He thinks no more of kill- 
 ing his mother, the frightful impulse points out to him 
 day and night his sister-in-law. To resist this second 
 impulse, he condemns himself to a perpetual exile. 
 
 *' Meanwhile a compatriot arrives at his regiment. 
 G16nadel confides to him his trouble. ' Reassure your- 
 self,' the other says to him, ' the crime is impossible, 
 your sister-in-law has just died.' At these words, 
 Gl^nadel rises up like a delivered captive ; he is filled 
 with joy; he sets out for his country, which he had not 
 seen since his childhood. On arriving, he perceives 
 his sister-in-law alive. He cries out, and the terrible 
 impulse instantly seizes him again like a prey. 
 
 ** That evening he made his brother tie him. ' Take 
 a stout rope, tie me like a wolf in the barn, and go and 
 notify Mr. Calmeil. . . .' He obtained from him his 
 admission into an asylum for the insane. The day be- 
 fore his entrance he wrote to the director of the estab- 
 lishment : * Sir, I am going to enter your house, I 
 shall conduct myself there as at the regiment. They 
 will think me healed ; perhaps at some moments I 
 may pretend to be so. Do not ever believe me ; I 
 must not go out any more under any pretext. When 
 I beg for my release, be more watchful than ever ; I 
 would use that liberty to commit a crime which horri- 
 fies me.'" 
 
 It must not be believed that this example is unique 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE UTLI. 6i 
 
 or even rare, and in the alienists v/e find several cases 
 of individuals who, tormented by a necessity of killing 
 persons who are dear to them, fly to an asylum to 
 make themselves prisoners. 
 
 The irresistible and yet conscious impulses to steal, 
 to commit arson, to destroy oneself by alcoholic ex- 
 cesses, enter into the same category.* Maudsley in 
 his ''Pathology of Mind,"t has collected so full a 
 range of examples that the best thing to do is to refer 
 the reader to it. 
 
 All those fatal tendencies classed under the names 
 of dipsomania, kleptomania, pyromania, erotomania, 
 homicidal and suicidal monomania are to-day no longer 
 considered as distinct morbid forms, but as different 
 manifestations of one single and the same cause : de- 
 generacy, that is to say, psychological instability and 
 lack of co-ordination. Nothing is more frequent than 
 the metamorphosis of one impulse into another, of hom- 
 icide into suicide or inversely. In a very fine case re- 
 ported by Morel, I we sec a degenerated person who is 
 driven in turn to suicide, homicide, sexual excesses, 
 alcoholism and incendiary attempts. It would be 
 curious for the psychologist to know why the unique 
 cause manifests itself in effects so diverse, here in one 
 manner and there in another ; why the epileptic is 
 more apt to be a thief, tlie imbecile an incendiary, etc. 
 It seems that the ultimate reason for these diversities 
 is found in the idios}'ncrasy of the degenerate person, 
 in his mental and physical constitution. § The solution 
 
 * See Trelat, Folie lucidc ; Maudsley, Crime and Insanity (French transla- 
 tion, p. iK6). 
 
 t French translation, chap, vii, p. 330 et seqq. 
 
 Xl^alaiiies mentales, p. 420. 
 
 $ Upon this point see SchQie, Maladies mentales, (translated from the Ger- 
 man), vol. ii, p. 423. 
 
62 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL. 
 
 of this problem does not concern us here. It is suffi- 
 cient to note that all these creatures of impulse have 
 the same characteristics : they are conscious, inco- 
 ordinated, incapable of struggle. 
 
 II. 
 
 It must be remarked in the first place that there is 
 an almost insensible transition between the health)^ 
 state and these pathological forms. The most reason- 
 able people have foolish impulses cross their brain ; 
 but these sudden and unusual states of consciousness 
 remain without effect, do not pass into action, because 
 they are destroyed by contrary forces, the general habit 
 of the mind ; because, between this isolated state and 
 its antagonists the disproportion is so great that there 
 is not even a struggle. 
 
 In other cases, to which very little importance is 
 ordinarily attached, there are acts which are fantastic, 
 ''but which have nothing in themselves reprehensible 
 or dangerous ; they ma}^ constitute a sort of a whim, 
 a crochet, a mania, using this last word in its usual and 
 vulgar sense. 
 
 ''At other times, without yet being very compromis- 
 ing, the acts are already more serious : they consist in 
 destroying, in striking without a motive an inanimate 
 object, in tearing up clothes. We have just now un- 
 der observation a young woman who ruins all lier 
 dresses. The instance is cited of an amateur who, 
 finding himself in a museum in front of a valuable pic- 
 ture, feels an instinctive impulse to break in the can- 
 vas. Very often these impulses pass unperceived and 
 are confided only to the consciousness which experi- 
 ences them."* 
 
 ♦ Foville, op. cit., p. 341. 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILE 63 
 
 Certain fixed ideas of a useless^or unreasonable na- 
 ture impose themselves upon the mind, \vhicli judges 
 them absurd, but is powerless to prevent them from 
 expressing themselves in acts. There will be found in 
 a work by Westphal some curious facts of this kind. 
 One man, for example, is pursued by this idea, that 
 he might have confided to a paper the statement that 
 he is the author of some crime or other, and have lost 
 that paper; consequently he preserves carefully all the 
 pieces of paper that he runs across, picks up scraps of 
 it in the street, assures himself that they contain no 
 writing, takes them to his house and makes a collection 
 of them. He has, moreover, full consciousness of the 
 puerility of this idea, which torments him all the time ; 
 he does not believe in it, but yet is unable to rid him- 
 self of it.* 
 
 Between the most silly acts and the most danger- 
 ous ones, there is only a quantitative difference : what 
 the first give on a small scale the others show en- 
 larged. Let us try to understand the mechanism of 
 this disorganisation of the will. 
 
 In the normal state an end is chosen, affirmed, car- 
 ried out ; that is to say that all or most of the elements 
 of the ego concur in it. The states of consciousness 
 (feelings, ideas, with their motor tendencies), the 
 movements of our members form a consensus which 
 converges towards the end, with more or less effort, by 
 a complex mechanism, composed at once of impulses 
 and of inhibitions. 
 
 •Westplial, I'dwr Zwangn>orsteUungen (Berlin, 1877). It may be re- 
 marked tliat, in certain cases, the fear of performing an act irresistibly leads 
 to it; for instance, the effects of vertigo, people who throw themselves down 
 in the street for fear of falling in it, who hurt themselves from fear of hurting 
 themselves, etc. All these facts have their explanation in the nature of the 
 mental representation, which, by very reason of its intensity, passes into ac- 
 tion. 
 
64 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL. 
 
 Such is the will in its complete and t3'pical form ; 
 but this is not a natural product. It is the result of 
 art, of education, of experience. It is an edifice con- 
 structed slowly, piece by piece. Observation, both 
 objective and subjective, shows that every form of 
 voluntary activity is the fruit of a conquest. Nature 
 furnishes only the materials ; a few simple movements 
 in the physiological order, a few simple associations in 
 the psychological order. By the aid of these simple 
 and almost invariable adaptations there must be formed 
 adaptations more and more complex and variable. 
 For example, the child has to acquire his power over 
 his legs, his arms, and all the movable parts of his 
 body by means of gropings and trials, in which the 
 appropriate movements are combined and the useless 
 ones suppressed. The simple groups thus formed are 
 combined into complex groups, those into still more 
 complex ones, and so on. In the ps3xhological order 
 an analogous operation is necessar3\ Nothing com- 
 plex is acquired at the onset. 
 
 But it is very clear that, in an edifice thus con- 
 structed little by little, the primitive materials alone 
 are stable, and that in measure as the complexity is 
 augmented the stability decreases. The most simple 
 actions are the most stable : for anatomical reasons, 
 because they are congenital, inscribed in the organism ; 
 for physiological, because they are perpetually re- 
 peated in the experience of the individual, and, if one 
 wishes to bring in heredity, which opens up an unlim- 
 ited field, in the numberless experiences of the exist- 
 ing species and of those from which it has sprung.* 
 
 * Voluntary power coming into existence when certain groups of move- 
 ments are obedient to certain states of consciousness, there may be cited by 
 way of a pathological case the fact reported by Meschede {Correspotidenz 
 Blatt, 1874, ii) of a man who "found himself in this singular condition that, 
 
IMPAIRMEXTS OF THE WILL. 65 
 
 Taking all together, what is surprising is that the 
 will, the activity of a complex and superior order, is able 
 to become dominant. The causes which elevate it to this 
 rank and maintain it there are the same which in man 
 elevate and maintain the intellect above sensations and 
 instincts : and, taking humanity as a whole, the facts 
 prove that the domination of the one is as precarious 
 as that of the other. The great development of the 
 cerebral mass in civilised man, the influence of educa- 
 tion and of the habits that it imposes, explain how, in 
 spite of so many contrary chances, the rational activity 
 often remains mistress. 
 
 The preceding pathological facts show well that the 
 will is not an entity reigning by right of birth, although 
 sometimes disobeyed, but a resultant always unstable, 
 always ready to decompose itself, and, to say truly, a 
 happy accident. These facts, and they are innumera- 
 ble, represent a state which can be called equally a 
 dislocation- of the will and a retrograde form of ac- 
 tivity. 
 
 If we consider the cases of irresistible impulses 
 with full consciousness, we see that that hierarchic 
 subordination of tendencies which is the will is divided 
 into two parts : for the consensus which alone consti- 
 tutes it there is substituted a struggle- between two 
 groups of contrary and almost equal tendencies, in such 
 sort that one might say that it is dislocated.* 
 
 when he wished to do a thing, of his own accord or at another's orders, he, or 
 rather his muscles, did just the contrary. When he wished to look to the 
 right, his eyes turned to tlie left, and this anomaly extended to all his other 
 movements. It was a simple contrariety of movement without any mental de- 
 rangement and which differed from involuntary movements in this : that he 
 never produced a movement except when he wished to, but that this move- 
 ment was always the contrary of what he wished." 
 
 • It might be shown, if this were the place for it, how fragile and untrust- 
 worthy is the unity of the ego. In this case of struggle, which is the true ego, 
 that which acts or that which resists ' If there be no choice, there must be 
 
66 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL, 
 
 If we consider the will no longer as a constituted 
 whole, but as the culminating point of an evolution, 
 we shall say that the inferior forms of activity are 
 carrying it away, and that the human activity is retro- 
 grading. Let us remark moreover that the term in- 
 ferior implies no moral preoccupation. It is an inferi- 
 ority of nature, because it is evident that an activity 
 which expends itself entirely in satisfying a fixed idea 
 or a blind impulse is by nature limited, adapted only 
 to the present and to a very small number of circum- 
 stances, while the rational activity goes beyond the 
 present and is adapted to a great number of circum- 
 stances. 
 
 . It must indeed be admitted, although the language 
 does not lend itself to it, that the will like the intellect 
 has its idiots and its geniuses, with all the possible de- 
 grees from one extreme to the other. From this point 
 of view, the cases cited in the first group (impulses 
 without consciousness) would represent the idiocy of 
 the will or more exactly its madness ; and the facts of 
 the second group, certain cases of volitional weakness, 
 analogous to intellectual debilities. 
 
 In order to pursue our study it is necessary to pass 
 from the analysis of the facts to the determination of 
 their cause. Is it possible to say upon what conditions 
 this impairment of the higher activity is dependent ? 
 In the first place, one should ask oneself if its decline 
 is an effect of the predominance of the reflexes, or if, on 
 the contrary, it is their cause ; in other terms, whether 
 the impairment of the will is the primary or the second- 
 two of them. If a choice be made, it must be admitted that the preferred 
 group represents the ego by the same title that in politics a small majority ob- 
 tained with great difficulty represents the State. But these questions cannot 
 be treated in passing ; I hope some day to make them the subject of a mono- 
 graph. 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL. 67 
 
 ary fact. This question does not admit of a general 
 answer. Observation shows that both cases are to be 
 met with ; and consequently one can only give a spe- 
 cial, answer for a special case whose circumstances are 
 well known. 
 
 It is indubitable that often the irresistible impulse 
 is the origo mali \ it constitutes a permanent patholo- 
 gical state. There takes place then in the psychological 
 order, a phenomenon analogous to the h3'pertrophy of 
 an organ or to the exaggerated proliferation of a tissue 
 in one part of the body, that, for example, which leads 
 to the formation of certain cancers. In the two cases, 
 physical and psychical, this local disorder affects the 
 whole organism. 
 
 The cases i.i which the voluntary activity is attacked 
 directl}^ not by a rebound, are for us the more inter- 
 esting. What takes place then? Is it the power of co- 
 ordination which is attacked, or the power of inhibition, 
 or both? This is an obscure point upon which only 
 conjectures can be offered. 
 
 For the sake of seeking som.e light, let us interro- 
 gate two new groups of facts : artificial and momentary 
 impairments produced by intoxication ; and chronic 
 impairments produced by cerebral lesion. 
 
 Everybody knows that the drunkenness caused by 
 alcoholic liquors, hasheesh, or opium, after a first period 
 of superexcitation brings about a notable weakening 
 of the will. The individual has more or less conscious- 
 ness of it ; others observe it still better. Very soon 
 (especially under the influence of alcohol), the impulses 
 are exaggerated ; the extravagances, violences, or 
 crimes committed in this state are without number. 
 The mechanism of the invasion of drunkenness is the 
 
68 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL, 
 
 subject of much dispute. It is generally admitted that 
 it commences in the brain, then acts on the spinal cord 
 and the medulla, and in the last place on the great 
 sympathetic. There is produced an intellectual obtu- 
 sion, that is to say, the states of consciousness are 
 vague, imperfectly distinguished, and of little intensity; 
 the physio-psychological activity of the brain has di- 
 minished. This enfeeblement extends also to the motor 
 power. Obersteiner has shown by experiments that, 
 under the influence of alcohol, there is a less speedy 
 reaction, although there is an illusion to the contrary.* 
 That which is affected is not only the ideation but the 
 ideo-motor activity. At the same time the power of co- 
 ordination becomes null or ephemeral and without en- 
 ergy. The co-ordination consisting at the same time in 
 making certain impulses converge towards a single 
 end and in arresting useless or antagonistic impulses, 
 it must be concluded from the fact that the reflexes are 
 exaggerated or violent, that the inhibitive power, what- 
 ever be its nature and mechanism, is injured, and that 
 its role in the constitution and maintenance of the vol- 
 untary activity is of the first importance. 
 
 Cerebral pathology furnishes other confirmatory 
 facts, more striking, because they show in the individ- 
 ual a sudden and persistent change. 
 
 Ferrier and other Authors cite cases where the le- 
 sion of the frontal convolutions (particular^ the first 
 and the second) brings about an almost total loss of 
 will, and reduces the being to automatism, or at least 
 to that state in which the reflex instinctive activity 
 
 *Brazn, Jan., 1879. A considerable number of experiments bearing on 
 this point have been made, with concordant results : Exner in Pfl iiger' s Archiv , 
 1873; Dietl and Vintschgau, ibid., 1877; and some important work of Krlpe- 
 lin's, done in Wundt's psycho-physical laboratory and published in the Philo- 
 sophische Studien, p. 573 seqq. 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE MTLI. 6g 
 
 reigns almost alone, without the possibilit}' of inhibi- 
 tion. 
 
 A child is wounded b}' a knife in the frontal lobe. 
 Seventeen years afterward he is found to be in good 
 ph3'sical health, ''but the injured man is incapable of 
 occupations necessitating mental labor. He is irrita- 
 ble, especially when he has been drinking or under- 
 gone some abnormal excitation." 
 
 A patient of Lepine's, stricken with an abscess in 
 the right frontal lobe, ''was in a state of stupefaction. 
 He seemed to understand what was said to him, but it 
 was only with difficulty that he could be made to pro- 
 nounce a word. He sat down when told to do so ; if 
 he was lifted up he could make some steps without as- 
 sistance." 
 
 A man who had received a violent blow which de- 
 stroyed the greater part of the first and second frontal 
 lobes "had lost his will. He understood, did as he 
 was directed, but in an automatic and mechanical man- 
 ner." 
 
 Several cases analogous to the preceding have been 
 reported, but the most important for us is that of the 
 "American quarryman." An iron bar thrown by a 
 blast went through his skull, injuring only tlie pre- 
 frontal region. He was healed and lived for twelve 
 years and a half after the accident ; but here is what 
 is reported of the mental state of the patient after his 
 healing. " His employers, who before his accident had 
 considered him as one of their best and most skilful 
 foremen, found him so changed that they could not 
 confide to him again his old post. The equilibrium, the 
 balance between his intellectual faculties and his in- 
 stinctive inclinations, seemed destroyed. He is ner- 
 vous, disrespectful, often swears in the coarsest man- 
 
70 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL, 
 
 ner ; which was not one of his habits previously. He 
 is hardly polite to his equals ; he bears contradiction 
 impatiently, and does not listen to advice when it is in 
 opposition to his own ideas. At certain moments he is 
 excessively obstinate, although he is in general capri- 
 cious and undecided. He makes plans for the future 
 that he abandons immediately for others. He is a 
 child in intelligence and intellectual manifestations, a 
 man in his passions and instincts. Before his acci- 
 dent, although he had not received any schooling, he 
 had a well-balanced mind and was regarded as a skil- 
 ful, penetrating man, very energetic and tenacious in 
 the execution of his plans. In this respect he is so 
 changed that his friends say that they no longer recog- 
 nise him," * 
 
 This case is very clear. In it the will is seen to 
 be impaired in measure as the lower activity is aug- 
 mented. It is another experiment, since it involves a 
 sudden change produced by an accident under well- 
 determined circumstances. 
 
 It is to be regretted that we have not many obser- 
 vations of this kind, for a great step would be made in 
 our interpretation of the diseases of the will. Unfor- 
 tunately the labors pursued with so much ardor on 
 cerebral localisations have principally been directed to 
 the motor and sensory regions, which, as is well known, 
 leave out the greater part of the frontal region. There 
 would be necessary also a critical examination of the 
 contrary facts, of the cases where no impairment of the 
 
 * For these and other facts see Ferrier, De la localisation des maladies 
 cirebrales, translated by Varigny, pp. 43-56; and C. De Boyer, Etudes cli- 
 niques sur les lesions corticales des hemispheres ci'r^braux (1879), pp. 48, 55, 56, 
 71. In half of the cases (twenty-three in all) of tumors, wounds, and abscesses 
 of the frontal lobes, Allen Star has noticed as the only symptoms : change of 
 character, incapacity for self-control, and loss of the faculty of attention. 
 Byain, No. 32, p. 570. 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF THE WILL 71 
 
 will appears to have been produced. This work done, 
 Ferrier's thesis — that in the frontal lobes there exist 
 centres of inhibition for intellectual operations — would 
 gain more consistency and would furnish a solid basis 
 for the determination of causes. As it is, it would be 
 impossible to go be3^ond the domain of conjectures. 
 
 In comparing irresistible impulses with abulia it 
 will be noted that the will fails as a result of entirely 
 contrary conditions. In one case the intellect is in- 
 tact and impulse is lacking ; in the other, the power 
 of co-ordination and inhibition being absent, the im- 
 pulse expends itself entirely to the profit of automatism. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 IMPAIRMENTS OF VOLUNTARY ATTENTION. 
 
 We are now about to study impairments of the will 
 of a less striking character, those of voluntary atten- 
 tion. They do not differ in nature from those of the 
 last group, consisting like them in a weakening of the 
 power of direction and adaptation. It is a diminution 
 of the will in the strictest, the narrowest, the most 
 limited sense, indisputable even by those who confine 
 themselves obstinately to subjective observation. 
 
 Before occupying ourselves with acquired weak- 
 ness, let us examine the congenital weakness of the 
 voluntary attention. Let us leave aside the narrow or 
 mediocre minds in whom the feelings, the intellect, and 
 the will are at the same level of weakness. It is more 
 curious to take a great mind, a man endowed with a 
 high intelligence, with a keen delicacy of feeling, but 
 in whom the directive power is lacking, in such wise 
 that the contrast between thought and will is com- 
 plete. We have an example of this in Coleridge. 
 
 *' There was probably no man of his time, or per- 
 haps of any time," says Carpenter,* *'who surpassed 
 Coleridge in the combination of the reasoning powers 
 of the philosopher with the imagination of the poet 
 
 * Mental Physiology, pp. 266-'9. 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF ATTENTION. 73 
 
 and the inspiration of the seer ; and there was perhaps 
 not one of the last generation who has left so strong 
 an impress of himself in the subsequent course of 
 thought of reflective minds engaged in the highest 
 subjects of human contemplation. And yet there was 
 probably never a man endowed with such remarkable 
 gifts who accomplished so little that was worthy of 
 them, the great defect of his character being the want 
 of will to turn his gifts to account ; so that, with nu- 
 merous gigantic projects constantly floating in his 
 mind, he never brought himself even seriously to at- 
 tempt to execute any one of them. It used to be said of 
 him, that whenever either natural obligation or volun- 
 tary undertaking made it his duty to do an}'thing, the 
 fact seemed a sufficient reason for his not doing it. Thus, 
 at the very outset of his career, when he had found a 
 bookseller (Mr. Cottle) generous enough to promise him 
 thirty guineas for poems which he recited to him, and 
 might have received the whole sum immediately on 
 delivering the manuscript, he went on, week after week, 
 begging and borrowing for his daily needs in the most 
 humiliating manner, until he had drawn from his pa- 
 tron the whole of the promised purchase-money, with- 
 out supplying him with a line of that poetry which he 
 had only to luritc down to free himself from obligation. 
 
 *' The habit of recourse to nervine stimulants (alco- 
 hol and opium) which he early formed, and from which 
 he never seemed able to free himself, doubtless still 
 further weakened his power of volitional self-control ; 
 so that it became necessary for his welfare that he 
 should yield himself to the control of others. . . . 
 
 **The composition of the poetical fragment * Kubla 
 Khan' /// ///.<■ sleeps as told in his 'Biographia Lite- 
 raria,' is a typical example of automatic mental action. 
 
74 THE DISEASES GF THE WILL. 
 
 He fell asleep whilst reading the passage in ' Pur- 
 chas's Pilgrimage ' in which the ' stately pleasure 
 house ' is mentioned ; and, on awaking, he felt as if he 
 had composed from two to three hundred lines, which 
 he had nothing to do but to write dowm, ' the images 
 rising up as things, with a parallel production of the 
 correspondent expressions, without any sensation or 
 consciousness of effort.' The whole of this singular 
 fragment, as it stands, consisting of fifty-four lines, was 
 written as fast as his pen could trace the words ; but 
 having been interrupted by a person on business, who 
 stayed with him above an hour, he found, to his sur- 
 prise and mortification, that, 'though he still retained 
 some vague and dim recollection of the general pur- 
 port of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight 
 or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had 
 passed away, like the images on the surface of a stream 
 into which a stone had been cast ; but, alas ! without 
 the after-restoration of the latter.' " 
 
 The accounts of his contemporaries regarding his 
 indefatigable conversation, his habit of dreaming aloud, 
 and his perfect forgetfulness of his hearers, leave the 
 impression of an exuberant intelligence, delivered to 
 an unbridled automatism. Curious or amusing anec- 
 dotes on this point abound. I will not give any of 
 them ; I prefer to leave to a master the care of depict- 
 ing the man. 
 
 Coleridge's "whole figure and air, good and amia- 
 ble otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute ; 
 expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. 
 He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent, and 
 stooping attitude ; in walking he rather sluiffled than 
 decisively stepped ; and a lady once remarked, he never 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF A TTENTION, 75 
 
 could fix which side of the garden-walk would suit him 
 best, but continually shifted, in corkscrew fashion, and 
 kept trying both. . . . 
 
 "Nothing could be more copious than his talk; 
 and furthermore it was always, virtually or literally, of 
 the nature of a monologue ; suffering no interruption, 
 however reverent ; hastily putting aside all foreign 
 additions, annotations, or most ingenuous desires for 
 elucidation, as well-meant superfluities which would 
 never do. Besides, it was talk not flowing anywhither 
 like a river, but spreading everywhither in inextricable 
 currents and regurgitations like a lake or sea ; terribly 
 deficient in definite goal or aim, nay often in logical in- 
 telligibility; w]iat }'ou were to believe or do, on any 
 earthly or heavenly thing, obstinately refusing to appear 
 from it. So that, most times, you felt logically lost, 
 swamped near to drowning in this tide of ingenious 
 vocables, spreading out boundless as if to submerge the 
 world. . . . 
 
 ''He began anywhere: you put some question to 
 him, made some suggestive observation : instead of 
 answering this, or decidedly setting out towards an- 
 swer of it, he would accumulate formidable apparatus, 
 logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers 
 and other precautionary and vehiculator}^ gear, for set- 
 ting out; perhaps did at last get under way, — but was 
 swiftly solicited, turned aside l)y the glance of some ra- 
 diant new game on this hand or that, into new courses ; 
 and ever into new ; and before long into all the uni- 
 verse, where it was uncertain what game you would 
 catch, or whether any. His talk, alas, was distin- 
 guished, like himself, by irresolution : it disliked to be 
 troubled with conditions, abstinences, definite fulfil- 
 
76 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL. 
 
 merits ; — loved to wander at its own sweet will and 
 make its auditor and his claims and humble wishes a 
 mere passive bucket for itself ! . . . 
 
 *^ Glorious islets, too, balmy, sunny islets of the 
 blest and the intelligible, I have seen rise out of the 
 haze, but they were few and soon swallowed in the 
 general element again. . . . 
 
 *' Eloquent, artistically expressive words you always 
 had; piercing radiances of a most subtle insight came 
 at intervals; tones of noble pious sympathy, recog- 
 nisable as pious though strangely colored, were never 
 wanting long : but in general you could not call this 
 aimless, cloud-capt, cloud-based, lawless^ meandering 
 human discourse of reason by the name of 'excellent 
 talk,' but only of 'surprising'; and were reminded 
 bitterly of Hazlitt's account of it : 'Excellent talker, 
 very, — if you let him start from no premises and come 
 to no conclusion.' '"^ 
 
 Let us descend now to commonplace examples of 
 acquired impairment of the voluntary attention. It 
 presents itself under tw^o forms : 
 
 i) The first is characterised by excessive intellec- 
 tual activity, a superabundance of states of conscious- 
 ness, an abnormal production of feelings and ideas in 
 a given time. We have already mentioned it in con- 
 nexion with alcoholic drunkenness. This cerebral ex- 
 uberance is most pronounced in the more intelligent 
 intoxication of hasheesh and opium. The individual 
 feels himself carried away by the uncontrollable flood 
 of his ideas, and language is not rapid enough to ex- 
 press the rapidity of thought ; but at the same time 
 the power of directing the ideas becomes weaker and 
 
 * Carlyle, The Life of John Sterlings (London, 1870) part i, chap, viii, pp. 
 65-08. 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF ATTENTION. 77 
 
 weaker, and the lucid moments shorter and shorter.* 
 This state of psychic exuberance, whatever be its cause, 
 whether fever, cerebral anaemia, or emotion, always has 
 the same result. 
 
 Between this state and attention there is, then, a 
 complete antagonism ; one excludes the other. It is, 
 furthermore, no more than a particular case of the ex- 
 aggeration of reflexes ; only there is question here of 
 psychic reflexes. In other terms every present state of 
 consciousness tends to expend itself, and it can do so 
 only in two ways : either in producing a movement, an 
 act, or else in awakening other states of consciousness,- 
 according to the laws of association. This last case is 
 a reflex of a more complex kind, a psychical reflex, but 
 it is like the other only a form of automatism. 
 
 2) The second form brings us back to the abulia 
 type : it consists in a progressive diminution of the 
 directive power and an eventual impossibility of intel- 
 lectual effort. 
 
 **In the incipient stage of disease of the brain the 
 patient complains of an incapacity to control and di- 
 rect the faculty of attention. He finds he cannot, 
 without an obvious and painful effort, accomplish his 
 usual mental work, read or master the contents of a 
 letter, newspaper, or even a page or two of a favorite 
 book. The ideas become restive, and the mind lapses 
 into a flighty condition, exhibiting no capacity for con- 
 tinuity of thought. 
 
 ** Fully recognising his impaired and failing ener- 
 gies, the patient repeatedly tries to conquer the de- 
 fect, and, seizing hold of a book, is resolved not to 
 succumb to his sensations of intellectual incapacity, 
 
 * Moreau, Du hachich et de I'alUnation mentaU, p. 60. Richet, Lit poi- 
 sons di tintelligtnct, p. 71. 
 
78 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 psychical languor, and cerebral weakness ; but he often 
 discovers that he has lost all power of healthy mental 
 steadiness, normal concentration, or co ordination of 
 thought. In his attempt to comprehend the meaning 
 of the immediate subject under consideration he reads 
 and re-reads with a determined resolution and appa- 
 rently unflagging energy, certain striking passages and 
 pages of a particular book, but without being able to 
 grasp the simplest chain of thought, or follow success- 
 fully an elementary process of reasoning ; neither is 
 he in a condition of mind fitting him to comprehend 
 or retain for many consecutive seconds the outline of 
 an interesting story; understand a simple calculation 
 of figures or narrative of facts. The attempt, par- 
 ticularly if it be a sustained one, to master and con- 
 verge the attention to the subject which he is trying 
 to seize, very frequent^ increases the pre-existing con- 
 fusion of mind, producing eventually physical sensa- 
 tion of brain lassitude and headache."* 
 
 Many general paralytics, after having passed 
 through the period of intellectual superactivity, that 
 of gigantic projects, of immoderate purchases, of jour- 
 neys without a motive, and of incessant loquacity, 
 when the will is dominated by the reflexes, arrive 
 at last at the period when it is impotent from atony; 
 effort lasts only a moment, until this ever increasing 
 passivity ends in madness.! 
 
 * Forbes Winslow, On Some Obscure Diseases of the Brain and Mind, chap, 
 xii (French translation, p. 216). 
 
 t Among this class of patients, some rare cases pass through a period of 
 struggle which shows well in what measure the will is mistress and how it 
 ends by succumbing. " I have seen at Bicetre," says Billed (loc. cit.), " a gen- 
 eral paralytic whose mania of greatness was as pronounced as possible, escape 
 and go bare-footed during a beating rain and by night from BicCtre to Batig- 
 nolles. The patient remained in the world a whole year, during which he 
 struggled with all his will against his intellectual mania, realising perfectly 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF ATTEXTIOX. 79 
 
 The reader can see, without commentaries, that the 
 diseases of voluntary attention are reducible to the 
 types already studied. So it will be more fruitful, with- 
 out multiph'ing examples, to endeavor to ascertain 
 what light that state of mind called attention can throw 
 upon the nature of the will, and what suggestions it 
 can contribute towards the conclusions of the present 
 work. 
 
 I do not need to make a stud}' of attention, how- 
 ever interesting and little known this subject ma}^ be. 
 The question can be dealt with here only indirectly, 
 that is to say only so far as it touches on the will. I 
 will reduce my conclusions on this point to the fol- 
 lowing propositions : 
 
 i) Voluntary attention, that whose wonders are 
 usually recounted, is only an artificial, unstable and 
 precarious imitation of spontaneous attention. 
 
 2) The latter alone is natural and efficacious. 
 
 3) It depends, in its origin and its continuance, on 
 certain affective states, on the presence of agreeable 
 or disagreeable feeiini:;s ; in a word, it is sensitive in 
 its origin, which assimilates it to the reflexes. 
 
 4) Inhibitive acts appear to play an important but 
 ill-comprehended part in the mechanism of attention. 
 
 To justify these propositions, it is well to examine 
 in the first place spontaneous attention, taking it under 
 its most diverse forms. The crouching animal watcli- 
 ing for its prey, the child gazing with eagerness at 
 some commonplace spectacle, the assassin waiting for 
 his victim at the corner of a wood (here the image re- 
 places the perception of the real object), the poet pos- 
 
 tbat at the first false idea they would take him back to Bic<*tre. He returned 
 there, nevertheless.— I have met several other examples of this persistence of 
 the integrity of the will for a considerable time in general paralytics." 
 
THE DISEASES OE THE WILL. 
 
 $ 
 
 sessed by an interior vision, the mathematician seeking 
 the solution of a problem :* all present essentially the 
 same external and internal characters. 
 
 I would readily define the intense and spontaneous 
 state of attention, with Sergi, as a differentiation of 
 perception producing a greater psychic energy in cer- 
 tain nervous centres with a sort of temporary catalepsy 
 of other centres. I But it is not the attention in itself 
 that I have to study ; what concerns us is to determine 
 its origin, its cause. 
 
 It is clear that in the states above enumerated and 
 analogous ones, the true cause is an affective state, a 
 feeling of pleasure, of love, of hatred, of curiosity; in 
 short a more or less complex state, agreeable, disagree- 
 able, or mixed. It is because the pre}^, the spectacle, 
 the idea of the victim, the problem to be resolved pro- 
 duce in the animal, the child, the assassin, the mathe- 
 matician an intense and sufficiently durable emotion 
 that they are attentive. Take away the emotion, all 
 disappears. So long as it lasts, attention lasts. Every- 
 thing takes place here, then, in the manner of those 
 
 * There is question here, it need not be said, only of those who are poets 
 or mathematicians by nature, not by education. 
 
 t "The complicated process of attention is determined by the same ana- 
 tomico-physiological conditions of the encephalic organs which are met with 
 in a simpler form in sensitive excitation. These conditions depend upon the 
 continued process of differentiation that the nervous elements undergo. We 
 have already seen a first process of differentiation in the transition from the 
 diffused [nervous] wave to the restricted wave, that is to say in the transition 
 from sensation to distinct perception ; which implies a cerebral localisation. 
 It is a process of still greater differentiation that we call attention. The exci- 
 tatory wave becomes more restricted and more intense, more localised and 
 more direct ; whereupon the entire phenomenon takes a clear and distinct 
 form." (Sergi, Teoria fisiologica dclla percezione, chap, xii, p. 216. Besides 
 this substantial chapter, the following works may be consulted on the atten- 
 tion studied from the point of view of the new psychology: Lewes, FrohlejHS 
 of Life and Mind, third series, p. 184 ; 'M.^yiA'&\ey, Physiology of Mind (^x&ac^i 
 translation, p. 457); Wundt, Griindziige dcr pJtysiologischen Fsycliologie, second 
 edition, p. 391 ; Ferrier, The Functions of the Brain, § 103.) 
 
IMPAIRMEXTS OF ATTENTWX. 8i 
 
 reflexes which appear continuous because an excitation 
 unceasingly repeated and always the same maintains 
 them up to the moment when nervous exhaustion takes 
 place. 
 
 Is a confirmation of this desired? Let it be ob- 
 served that children, women, and light minds in gen- 
 eral are capable of attention onl}^ during a very short 
 time, because things awaken in them only superficial 
 and unstable feelings ; that they are completely inat- 
 tentive to high, complex, and profound questions, be- 
 cause they leave them cold ; that they are on the con- 
 trary attentive to insignificant things because they in- 
 terest them. I might recall moreover, that the orator 
 and the writer hold the attention of their public by ap- 
 pealing to their feelings (satisfaction, terror, etc.). 
 The question can be looked at from every side and the 
 same conclusion forces itself upon us. I would not 
 insist upon so evident a fact if the authors who have 
 studied the attention did not appear to me to have for- 
 gotten this most important influence. 
 
 On this account it should be said that spontaneous 
 attention gives a maximum of result with a minimum 
 of effort, while voluntary attention gives a minimum 
 of result with a maximum of effort ; and that this oppo- 
 sition is so much the more marked as the one is more 
 spontaneous and the other more voluntary. In its 
 highest degree, voluntary attention is an artificial state 
 in which, by the aid of assumed feelings, we maintain 
 with great difficulty certain states of consciousness 
 which tend only to disappear (for example, when we 
 follow, for politeness sake, a very tiresome conversa- 
 tion). In one case what determines tliis specialisation 
 of consciousness is our whole individuality; in the sec- 
 
82 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL. 
 
 ond it is an extremely weak and limited portion of 
 our individuality. 
 
 Many questions would arise here ; but, I repeat, I 
 do not need to study attention in itself. I simply had 
 to show (regarding which I hope there remains no 
 doubt) that it is in its origin of the same nature as the 
 reflexes ; that in its spontaneous form it has their regu- 
 larity and their power of action; that in its voluntary 
 form it is much less regular and powerful ; but that, in 
 both cases, it is a sensitive excitation which causes it, 
 maintains it, and measures it. 
 
 We see once more that the voluntary is bound up 
 with the involuntary, supports itself on it, draws from it 
 its force, and is in comparison with it very weak. The 
 education of attention consists only in arousing and 
 developing these factitious sentiments and in trying to 
 render them stable by repetition ; but as there is no 
 creation ex ?iihiIo, they must have a natural basis, 
 however slight it may be. To conclude this point, I 
 will admit that I accept, for my part, the paradox of 
 Helvetius, so often combated, '' that all the intellectual 
 differences among men come from attention alone," 
 with the reservation that there is question on/y of spon- 
 taneous attention ; but then it amounts to no more 
 than to say that the differences among men are innate 
 and natural. 
 
 After having shown how attention is produced it 
 remains to ascertain how it is kept up. The difficulty 
 arises only in the case of voluntar}' attention. We have 
 seen, in fact, that the maintenance of spontaneous at- 
 tention explains itself. It is continuous because the ex- 
 citation which causes it is continuous. On the contrary, 
 the more voluntary attention is, the more effort it re- 
 quires and the more unstable it is. Both cases reduce 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF ATTEXTIOX. '^^ 
 
 themselves to a struggle between different states of 
 consciousness. In the first case, one state of conscious- 
 ness (or to say better, a group of states) is so intense 
 that no struggle against it is possible and that it im- 
 poses itself by its living force. In the second case, the 
 group has not in itself a sufficient intensity to impose 
 itself ; it is enabled to do this only by an additional force, 
 which is the intervention of the will. By what mechan- 
 ism does it act? As it would seem, b}' an arrest of 
 movements. We are thus brought back to the prob- 
 lem of inhibition, more obscure here than anywhere 
 else. Let us see what can be supposed in regard to 
 this. In the first place, it is hardly necessar}^ to recall 
 that the brain is a motjr organ, that is to say that a 
 great number of its elements are devoted to the pro- 
 duction of movement and that there is not a single 
 state of consciousness which does not in some degree 
 contain motor elements. Hence it follows that every 
 state of attention implies the existence of these ele- 
 ments. "In movements of the limbs and trunk the 
 feelings of operation are very conspicuous ;* they are 
 less so in the delicate adjustment of the eye, ear, 
 etc., and are only inductively recognisable in the 
 still more delicate adjustments of attention and com- 
 prehension, which arc also acts of the mind in more 
 than a metaphorical sense. The purest intellectual 
 combinations involve motor impulses (feelings of ope- 
 ration) quite as necessarily as the combination of 
 muscles in manipulation. The feelings of effort and 
 rehef in seeking and finding our way through an ob- 
 scure and tangled mass of ideas — the tcntatives of 
 hypothesis and induction — arc but fainter forms of the 
 feelings in seeking and finding our way along a dark 
 
 • Lewes, Problems of Life and of Mind, tliird series, p. 397. 
 
84 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL. 
 
 road or thick forest." Let us recall once more that 
 every state of consciousness, especially when it is very 
 intense, tends to pass into action, to express itself in 
 movements, and that, as soon as it enters into its mo- 
 tory phase, it loses its intensity, it is in decline, it tends 
 to disappear from consciousness. — But a present state 
 of consciousness has another manner of expending it- 
 self, which is to transmit its tension to other states ac- 
 cording to the mechanism of association. It is, if you 
 like, an internal expenditure in place of an external 
 one. At the same time the association which starts 
 from the present state does not take place in one way 
 only. In spontaneous attention, certain associations 
 prevail alone and of themselves, by their own intensity. 
 In voluntary attention (reflexion represents its highest 
 form), we are conscious of an irradiation in several 
 directions. Better yet, in the cases where we have 
 much trouble to be attentive, the prevailing associa- 
 tions are those that we do not wish, that is to say which 
 are not chosen, affirmed as the ones that ought to be 
 maintained. 
 
 By what means, then, are the weaker ones main- 
 tained ? In order to represent to ourselves so far as 
 possible, what takes place in such a case, let us con- 
 sider some facts which are analogous but of a more 
 palpable kind. Let us take a man who is learning to 
 play on an instrument or to handle a tool, or better still, 
 a child who is learning to write. At the outset he pro- 
 duces a great number of completely useless movements; 
 he moves his tongue, his head, his face, his legs, and it 
 is only little by little that he learns to hold his organs 
 in subjection and to limit himself to the necessary 
 movements of the hands and eyes. 
 
 In voluntary attention things take place in an analo- 
 
IMPAIRMENTS OF ATTENTION. 85 
 
 gous manner. The associations which diffuse them- 
 selves in all directions may be likened to these useless 
 movements. The problem, in one case as in the other, 
 is to substitute a limited and restrained diffusion for an 
 unlimited diffusion. For that purpose, we check the 
 associations which do not serve our end. Properly 
 speaking, we do not suppress states of consciousness, 
 but we prevent them from surviving and awakening 
 analogous states, and from propagating themselves in 
 their own wa}'. We know, moreover, that this attempt 
 is often unsuccessful, always difficult, and in certain 
 cases has to be incessantly repeated^ At the same time 
 that we prevent this diffusion in all directions, the dis- 
 ponible nervous force is economised to our profit. To 
 diminish the useless diffusion is to augment the useful 
 concentration. 
 
 Such is the idea that one obtains of this obscure 
 phenomenon when one tries to penetrate its mechan- 
 ism, in place of having recourse to a pretended *' fac- 
 ulty" of attention which explains nothing. We must, 
 however, recognise with Ferrier that on what phys- 
 iological basis this psychological faculty rests, is an 
 extremely difficult question, and one hardly capable 
 of an experimental determination.* We would add 
 that the preceding pretends only to be an approxima- 
 tion, not an explanation. 
 
 * Op. cil., chapter xii. For a more detailed study of this question, we would 
 refer to our Psychology of Attention [second edition, The Open Court Pub. 
 Co., Chicago, i«94j. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE REALM OF CAPRICES. 
 
 To WILL is to choose in order to act ; such is for us 
 the formula of the normal will. The anomalies hitherto 
 studied reduce themselves to two great groups : either 
 the impulse is lacking, and no tendency to action is 
 produced (abulia) ; or a too rapid or too intense im- 
 pulse prevents a choice. Before examining the cases 
 of obliteration of the will, that is to say those in which 
 there is neither choice nor acts, we will study a type of 
 character in which the will does not constitute itself at 
 all or does so only in a wavering, unsteady and ineffica- 
 cious form. The best example of it that can be given 
 is the hysterical character. Properly speaking we en- 
 counter here not so much a disorder as a constitutional 
 state. The simple irresistible impulse is like an acute 
 disease ; the permanent and invincible impulses resem- 
 ble a chronic disease ; the hysterical character is a dia- 
 thesis. It is a state in which the conditions of the ex- 
 istence of the will are nearly always lacking. 
 
 I borrow from the picture of the character of h3^s- 
 terics that Dr. Huchard has recently drawn, the fea- 
 tures which relate to our subject : ^'A primary trait of 
 their character is mobility. From day to da)^, from 
 hour to hour, from minute to minute, they pass with 
 an incredible rapidit}^ from jo}^ to sadness, from laugh- 
 
THE REALM OE CAPRICES. 87 
 
 ter to tears ; versatile, fantastic or capricious, they 
 speak at certain moments with an astonishing loqua- 
 city, while at others they become gloomy and taciturn, 
 keep a complete silence, or remain plunged in a state 
 of reverie or of mental depression ; they are then 
 seized with a vague and indefinable feeling of sadness, 
 with a sensation of pressure in the throat, of a rising 
 ball, or of epigastric oppression ; they burst into sobs, 
 or they go to hide their tears in solitude, which they 
 crave and seek ; at other times, on the contrary, they 
 begin to laugh in an immoderate manner without se- 
 rious motives, 'They behave,' says Ch. Richet, Mike 
 children that one sets to laughing with noises when 
 they still have on their cheeks the tears that they have 
 just shed.' 
 
 ''Their character changes like the figures of a ka- 
 leidoscope, which has led Sydenham to say with rea- 
 son that the most constant thing about them is their 
 inconstancy. Yesterday they were lively, amiable and 
 gracious ; to-day they are ill-humored, susceptible and 
 irascible, vexed at everything and at nothing, capri- 
 ciously disagreeable and sulky, discontented with their 
 lot ; nothing interests them, they arc wearied with every- 
 thing. They experience a very great antipathy toward 
 a person whom yesterday they loved and esteemed, or, 
 on the contrary, show an incomprehensible sympathy 
 for some one else ; so they follow certain persons with 
 their hatred with as much bitterness as they liad for- 
 merly had persistence in surrounding them with affec- 
 tion. . . . 
 
 ** Sometimes their sensibility is exalted by the most 
 trivial motives when it is hardly touched by the great- 
 est emotions; they remain almost indifferent, impas- 
 sible even, at the announcement of a real misfortune, 
 
88 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 and they shed tears abundantly and abandon them- 
 selves to the profoundest despair on account of a sim- 
 ple word falsely interpreted, and transform into an of- 
 fence the lightest pleasantry. This sort of moral ataxia 
 is observed even in regard to their dearest interests : 
 one has the most complete indifference towards the 
 misconduct of her husband ; another remains cold be- 
 fore danger which menaces her fortune. In turn gen- 
 tle and passionate, says Moreau (of Tours), kind and 
 cruel, impressionable to excess, rarely mistresses of 
 their first movements, incapable of offering resistance 
 to impulses of the most opposite nature, presenting a 
 lack of equilibrium between the superior moral facul- 
 ties, will and conscience, and the inferior faculties, the 
 instincts, passions, and desires. 
 
 ''This extreme mobility in their state of mind and 
 their affective dispositions, this instabilit}^ of character, 
 this lack of fixity, this absence of stabilit}^ in their ideas 
 and their volitions, explain the incapacity which they 
 experience of giving their attention very long to read- 
 ing, study, or any kind of work. 
 
 ''All these changes follow each other with the 
 greatest rapidity. In this class of patients the im- 
 pulses are not, as in the case of epileptics, absolutely 
 uncontrolled by the intellect, but they are rapidly fol- 
 lowed by action. This is the explanation of those 
 sudden movements of anger and indignation, those 
 headlong enthusiasms, those fits of despair, those ex- 
 plosions of mad gaiety, those great bursts of affection, 
 those quick accessions of tenderness, or those sudden 
 transports during which, acting like spoiled children, 
 they stamp with their feet, break furniture, feel an irre- 
 sistible need of striking something. . . . 
 
 "Hysterical patients act as they are led by their 
 
THE REALM OF CAPRICES. 89 
 
 passions. Almost all the various inconstancies of their 
 character, of their mental state, can be summed up in 
 these words : they do not know how to use their will, 
 they cannot and will not do it. It is, indeed, because 
 their will is always unsteady and faltering, because it 
 is unceasingly in a state of unstable equilibrium, be- 
 cause it turns at the least wind like the weather-vane 
 on our roofs; it is for all these reasons that hysterical 
 patients have such mobility, such inconstancy, and 
 such changeableness in their desires, their ideas, and 
 their affections.'"^' 
 
 This portrait is so complete that we need not pro- 
 long our comments. It has put before the readers' 
 eyes that state of incoordination, of broken equili- 
 brium, of anarch}', of ''moral ataxia "; but we have yet 
 to justify the statement that we made at the outset : 
 that there is here a constitutional impotence of the 
 will; that it cannot arise because the conditions of its 
 existence are lacking. For the sake of clearness I will 
 anticipate wliat is to be established with more details 
 and proofs at the close of this work. 
 
 If we take an adult person, endowed with an ave- 
 rage will, we will observe that his activity (that is to 
 say, his power of producing acts) forms in general three 
 planes : on the lowest are the automatic acts, simple 
 or composite reflexes, habits ; above are acts produced 
 by the feelings, emotions, and passions ; higher still 
 are rational acts. This last stage presupposes the 
 other two, rests on tliem, and consequently depends 
 upon them, althongli it gives them co-ordinatioif and 
 unity. The cajiricious characters of which the hys- 
 teric is the type have only the two lower forms ; the 
 
 • Axcnfeld and Hucbard, Traiti dfs nH'roxes (second edition, 1883), pp. 
 958-97 «• 
 
go THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 third is, as it were, atrophied. By nature, save in rare 
 exceptions, the rational activity is always the least 
 strong. It obtains the mastery only on the condition 
 that the ideas awaken certain feelings which are much 
 more apt than they to express themselves in acts. We 
 have seen that the more abstract ideas are, the weaker 
 their motory tendencies. In hysterical patients the 
 regulative ideas do not arise or remain sterile. It is 
 because certain notions of the rational order (utility, 
 propriety, duty, etc.) remain in the state of mere con- 
 ceptions, because they are not felt by the individual, 
 because they produce in him no affective response, do 
 not enter into his substance, but remain like something 
 brought in from outside ; it is on these accounts that 
 they are without action and for all practical purposes as 
 if they did not exist. The power of individual action is 
 maimed and incomplete. The tendency of the feelings 
 and passions to show themselves in acts is doubly 
 strong, both in itself and because there is nothing 
 above it which checks and counterbalances it ; and as 
 it is a characteristic of the feelings to go straight to 
 the goal, after the manner of reflexes, to have an 
 adaptation in one single direction, unilateral (just the 
 contrary to rational adaptation, which is multilateral), 
 the desires, born quickly and immediately satisfied, 
 leave free room for others, analogous or opposed, ac- 
 cording to the perpetual variations of the individual. 
 There exist only caprices, at most desires, a rough out- 
 line of volition.* 
 
 This fact, that desire goes in a single direction and 
 tends to expend itself without delay, does not, how- 
 
 * Let us note in passing how necessary it is in psychology to take account 
 of the ascending gradation of phenomena. Volition is not a clear and well- 
 defined state which either exists or does not exist; there are sketches and 
 attempts. 
 
THE REALM OF CAPRICES. 91 
 
 ever, explain the instability of the hj'steric, nor his ab- 
 sence of will. If a desire always satisfied springs up 
 again continually, there is stability. The predomi- 
 nance of the affective life does not necessarily exclude 
 the will : an intense, stable, permitted passion is the 
 very basis of all energetic wills. It is found in the 
 great men of ambition, in the martyr unshaken in his 
 faith, in the red-skin bidding defiance to his enemies 
 in the midst of torments. It is necessary, then, to seek 
 more deeply the cause of this instability in the hysteric, 
 and this cause can be nothing else than a state of the 
 individuality, that is to say, in the final reckoning, of 
 the organism. We call that will strong whose end, 
 whatever be its nature, is fixed. When circumstances 
 change, means are changed ; there take place succes- 
 sive adaptations to the new environment, but the cen- 
 tre towards which all converges does not change. Its 
 stability expresses the permanency of character in the 
 individual. If the same end continues to be chosen, 
 approved, it is because that at bottom the individual 
 remains the same. Let us suppose, on the contrary, 
 an organism with unstable functions, whose unity — 
 which is only a consensus — is continually dissolved 
 and reconstituted on a new plan, according to the sud- 
 den variation of the functions that make it up ; it is 
 clear that in such a case choice can hardly arise, can- 
 not last, and there remain only whims and caprices. 
 This is what takes place in the hysteric. The in- 
 stability is a fact. Its very probable cause is in func- 
 tional disorders. Anaesthesia of special senses or of 
 the general sensibility, hyperaesthesia in its various 
 forms, motor disorders, contractures, convulsions, pa- 
 ralyses, derangements of tlie organic functions, vaso- 
 motor, secretory, etc., occurring successively or sinuil- 
 
92 THE DISEASES OE THE WILE 
 
 taneously, keep the organism in a perpetual state of 
 unstable equilibrium,* and the character, which is only 
 the psychic expression of the organism, correspond- 
 ingly varies. A stable character upon such an unsteady 
 foundation would be a miracle. We find, therefore, 
 the true cause of impotence of will to be here, and this 
 impotence is, as we have said, constitutional. 
 
 Some facts contradictory in appearance really con- 
 firm this thesis. Hysterical patients are sometimes 
 possessed by a fixed idea, which cannot be conquered. 
 One refuses to eat, another to speak, another to see, 
 because the labor of digestion, or the exercise of the 
 voice or the sight would bring about, as they suppose, 
 some suffering. One meets more frequently with that 
 kind of paralysis which has been called ''psychic" or 
 ''ideal." The hysteric stays in bed for weeks, months, 
 and even years, believing herself unable to stand up 
 or to walk. A moral shock, or the mere influence-of 
 some one who gains her confidence or acts with author- 
 ity effects a cure. One begins to walk at the announce- 
 ment of a fire, another gets up and goes to meet a 
 long-absent brother, another decides to eat out of fear 
 of the physician. Briquet, in his " Trait6 de I'hj^s- 
 t^rie," reports several cases of women whom he healed 
 by inspiring them with faith in their recovery. There 
 might also be mentioned a good number of those cures 
 called miraculous which have attracted the public curi- 
 osity from the time of the deacon Paris to our own day. 
 
 The physiological causes of these paralyses are 
 much in dispute. In the psychological order we ob- 
 serve the existence of a fixed idea the result of which 
 is an inhibition. As an idea does not exist by itself 
 and without certain cerebral conditions, as it is only a 
 
 * For the details of the facts see the work cited, pp. 9S7-1043. 
 
THE REALM OE CAPRICES. 93 
 
 part of a psycho-physiological whole — the conscious 
 part — it must be admitted that it corresponds to an 
 abnormal state of the organism, perhaps of the motor 
 centres, and that it draws thence its origin. However 
 that may be, it is not, as certain medical men have per- 
 sistently maintained, an * ' exaltation " of the will ; it fs, 
 on the contrary, its absence. We are recurring to a 
 morbid type already studied, which differs from irresis- 
 tible impulses only in form ; it is inhibitory. But there 
 is no direct reaction against the fixed idea on the indi- 
 vidual's own part. It is an influence from without 
 which imposes itself and produces a contrary state of 
 consciousness, with the concomitant feelings and phys- 
 iological states. There results from this a powerful 
 impulse to action, which suppresses and replaces the 
 inhibitory state ; but it is hardly a volition ; at best it 
 is a volition with another's aid. 
 
 This group of facts brings us, then, to the same 
 conclusion : an impotence of the will to form itself.* 
 
 •For the facts see Briquet, Traite de l' hysteric, c\\^^^. a; Axeiifeld and 
 Huchard, op. cit.. pp. 967-1012; Cruveilhier, Anatomie pathologiquc, book 
 XXXV, p. 4 ; Macario, Annales medico-psychologiques, vol. iii, p. 62 ; Ch. Ricliet, 
 in Revue dfs Deux Afondes, Jan. 15, 1880 ; P. Richer, Etudes cliniques sur I' hys- 
 tiro-ipiUpsie, &\.c.y part third, chap, ii, and the historic notes. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE EXTINCTION OF THE WILL. 
 
 The cases of extinction of the will, upon whose 
 study we are now to enter, are those in which there is 
 neither choice nor action. When all the ps3xhic ac- 
 tivity is or seems to be completely suspended, as in 
 deep sleep, artificial anaesthesia, coma, and analogous 
 statea, it is a return to the vegetative life ; we have 
 nothing to say of this ; the will disappears, because 
 everything disappears. Here we have to do with cases 
 where a form of mental activity persists, although 
 there is no possibility of choice followed by action. 
 This annihilation of the will is met with in ecstasy and 
 in somnambulism. 
 
 Various kinds of ecstasy have been distinguished : 
 profane, mystical, morbid, physiological, cataleptic, 
 somnambulic, etc. These distinctions do not concern us 
 here, the mental state remaining the same at bottom. 
 Most ecstatics reach that state naturally, as a result of 
 their constitution. Others assist nature by artificial 
 processes. The religious and philosophical literature 
 of the Orient, of India in particular, abounds in docu- 
 ments from which it has been possible to gather a sort 
 
THE EXTINCTION OF THE WILL. 95 
 
 of working manual for the attainment of ecstasy. To 
 remain motionless, to gaze fixedly at the sk}', a lumi- 
 nous object, the end of the nose, or, one's navel (like 
 the monks of Mount Athos called omphalopsychi)^ to 
 repeat continually the monosyllable Cm (Brahm), 
 while contemplating the Supreme Being ; '*to retain 
 the breath," that is to say, to slacken one's respiration ; 
 ''not to concern oneself either with time or with 
 place "; such are the means which " make one resem- 
 ble the placid light of a lamp set in a place where the 
 wind does not blow." * 
 
 When this state is attained, the ecstatic presents 
 certain physical characteristics : sometimes motionless 
 and mute, sometimes expressing the vision that pos- 
 sesses him by words, songs, and attitudes. He rarely 
 moves from his position. His physiognomy is ex- 
 pressive ; but his eyes, even though open, do not see. 
 Sounds no longer affect him ; save, in some cases, the 
 voice of a particular person. General sensibility is 
 
 * Bhagavad-gitn, chap. vi. The Buddhist teachers say that there are four 
 degrees in the contemplation which leads to the terrestrial Nirvfina. 
 
 The first degree is the inward feeling of happiness which arises in the 
 soul of the ascetic when he considers himself to have at length come to dis- 
 tinguish the nature of things. The yogi is then detached from every desire 
 but that of Nirvana ; he still reasons and exercises judgment ; but he is freed 
 from all the conditions of sin and vice. 
 
 In the second degree he is equally unstained by vice and sin, but in addi- 
 tion he has put aside judgment and reasoning; his intellect fixes itself upon 
 Nirvana alone, and simply feels the pleasure-of interior satisfaction without 
 judging of it or even understanding it. 
 
 In the third degree the pleasure of satisfaction has disappeared, and the 
 sage has become indifferent in regard to the happiness that his intellect still 
 experiences. The only pleasure which remains to him is a vague sense of 
 physical well-being with which his whole body Is inundated; he has still a 
 confused consciousness of himself. 
 
 Finally, in the fourth degree, the yogi no longer possesses this sense of 
 physical well-being, obscure as it is; he has also lost all memory; he has even 
 lost the sense of his indifference. Free from all pleasure and from all suffer- 
 ing, he has attained to impassibility, and is as near to Nirvfina as he can be 
 during this life. (Uarlh. Saint-Milaire, I^ BoutUha ft sa religion, pp. 136, 137.) 
 
96 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 extinct ; no contact is felt ; neither pricking nor burn- 
 ing causes pain. 
 
 What he inwardly experiences, the ecstatic alone 
 can tell, and were it not that he retains at waking a 
 very distinct recollection of it, the profane would be 
 reduced to inductions regarding it. The narratives and 
 writings of ecstatics show, in the midst of differences 
 of race, of belief, of mind, of time and of place, a 
 striking uniformity. Their mental state reduces itself 
 to one image-idea, either alone or constituting the 
 nucleus of a single group which engrosses the entire 
 consciousness and maintains itself in it with an ex- 
 treme intensity. Several mystics have described this 
 state with great delicacy, above all St. Teresa. I there- 
 fore extract a few passages from her autobiography, in 
 order to place before the reader an authentic descrip- 
 tion of the ecstasy. 
 
 For uniting oneself to God, there are four degrees of 
 '/prayer," which she compares to four methods, each 
 easier than the preceding, of watering a garden : '* the 
 first by drawing water from a well by strength of arm 
 which is severe labor ; the second, by drawing it up 
 with a noria (a h3^draulic machine), in which way 
 there is obtained with less fatigue a greater quantit)^ of 
 water ; the third by conducting the water from a river 
 or brook ; the fourth, and incomparably the best, is 
 an abundant rain, God himself undertaking the water- 
 ing without the slightest fatigue on our part " (chap. xi). 
 
 In the two first degrees, there are as yet only at- 
 tempts at ecstasy which the saint notes in passing : 
 *' Sometimes while reading I was suddenly seized 
 with a feeling of the presence of God. It was abso- 
 lutely impossible for me to doubt that he was within 
 me, or that I was wholly lost in liim. This was not a 
 
THE EXTINCTIOX QF THE WILL, 97 
 
 vision. ... It suspends the soul in such wise that it 
 seems to be utterly beside itself. The will loves, mem- 
 ory appears to me almost gone, the understanding does 
 not act, and nevertheless it does not lose itself." In a 
 higher degree which is '' neither a rapture nor a spiri- 
 tual sleep," " the will alone acts, and, without knowing 
 how it becomes captive, it simply gives to God its con- 
 sent, that he may imprison it, secure of falling into the 
 fetters of Him whom it loves. . . . The understanding 
 and memory come to the assistance of the will, that it 
 may render itself more and more capable of enjoying 
 so great a good. Sometimes, however, their aid serves 
 only to trouble it in this intimate union with God. 
 But then the will, without allowing itself to be dis- 
 turbed by their importunity, should keep itself in the 
 delight and the profound calm which it is enjoying. To 
 try to fix its two powers [faculties] would be to carry 
 them away with it. They are then like doves which, 
 discontented with the food that their master gives 
 them without any effort on their part, go to look for 
 some elsewhere, but which, after a vain search, hasten 
 to return to the dove-cote." In this degree, *' I re- 
 gard it as a very great advantage, when I write, to find 
 myself actually in the prayer of which I am treating, 
 for I see clearly then that neither the expression nor 
 the thought comes from me ; and when it is written, I 
 can no longer understand how I have been able to do 
 it, which happens to me often." 
 
 In the third degree we come to the ecstasy: "This 
 state is a sleep of the powers [faculties] wherein, with- 
 out being entirely lost in God, they nevertheless do 
 not understand how they operate. ... It is like some 
 one who, sighing after death, holds already in the hand 
 the blessed candle and has only one breath more to ex- 
 
98 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL, 
 
 hale in order to see itself at the consummation of its de- 
 sires. It is for the soul an agony full of inexpressible de- 
 light, wherein it feels itself almost entirely dying to all 
 the things of earth and reposes with rapture in the en- 
 joyment of its God. I find no other terms to depict or 
 explain what it experiences. In this state it does not 
 know what to do : it does not know whether it is speak- 
 ing or is silent ; whether it laughs or weeps ; it is a 
 glorious delirium, a celestial madness, a supremely de- 
 licious kind of enjoyment. . . . While it thus seeks its 
 God, the soul feels itself with a very keen and very sweet 
 pleasure almost fainting away; it falls into a species of 
 swoon which little by little deprives the body of re- 
 spiration and of all its strength. It cannot, without a 
 very painful effort make even the slightest movement 
 of the hands. The eyes close without its wishing to 
 close them, and, if it keeps them open, it sees almost 
 nothing. It is incapable of reading, had it the de- 
 sire to ; it indeed perceives the letters, but, as the 
 mind does not act, it can neither distinguish nor asso- 
 ciate them. When spoken to, it hears the sound of 
 the voice, but not distinct words. So it receives no 
 service from its senses. . . . All exterior forces abandon 
 it : feeling thereby its own increase it can better enjoy 
 its glory. ... In truth, to judge of it by my experience, 
 this prayer is at first of such short duration that it does 
 not reveal itself in so manifest a way by external signs 
 and the suspension of the senses. It is to be remarked, 
 at least in my opinion, that this suspension of all the 
 powers never lasts long ; it is very much when it 
 reaches a half hour, and I do not think that with me 
 it has ever lasted so long. It must be admitted, how- 
 ever, that it is difficult to judge of it, since one is at 
 the time deprived of feeling. I wish simply to make 
 
THE EXTINCTION OF THE WILL. 99 
 
 this observation : whenever this general suspension 
 takes place, very little time elapses in which one or 
 another of the powers does not return to itself. The 
 will is the one which maintains itself best in the divine 
 union, but the two others very soon begin to importune 
 it. As it is in the calm, it brings them back and sus- 
 pends them anew ; they remain thus tranquil some 
 minutes and then take up again their natural life. The 
 prayer, with these alternations, can and does prolong 
 itself, in fact, for some hours. . . . But that state of com- 
 plete ecstasy, in which the imagination, which I hold 
 to be equally rapt, does not wander to any external ob- 
 ject, is, I repeat, of short duration. I would add that 
 the powers returning to themselves only imperfectly, 
 they may remain in a sort of delirium for some hours, 
 during which God from time to time enraptures them 
 anew, and fixes them in himself. . . . What transpires 
 in this secret union is so hidden that one would not 
 know how to speak of it more clearly. The soul then 
 sees itself so near God and possesses such a certainty of 
 it, that it cannot have the slightest doubt as to the real- 
 ity of such a favor. All its powers lose their natural 
 activity; they have no knowledge of their operations. . . . 
 That troublesome butterfly of memory sees then its 
 wings scorched here, and it is no longer able to flit 
 hither and thither. The will is no doubt occupied in 
 loving, but it does not understand how it loves. In 
 regard to the understanding, if it understands, it is by 
 a mode whicli remains unknown to it, and it can com- 
 prehend nothing of what it understands." * 
 
 I will not follow St. Tttresa in licr dcscripliou of 
 
 • T/V de Sattttf Thi'r^st fir it,- />iir rlU-mPm/', tran«;latf(i by Rev. r.ither 
 Bouix (tenth edition), pp. 90, 91, 96, 138, 142, 157, i77-i»o. Conjpare also Plo- 
 tinus, Ennt'aJes, vi ; Tauler, Institution chritifnnc, chapters xii, xxvi, xxxv. 
 
loo THE DISEASES OF THE WtLt. 
 
 the ''rapture " (chapter xx), ''that divine eagle, which 
 with a sudden impetuosity seizes 3''ou and carries you 
 off." These extracts suffice, and any one who reads 
 them with attention will not hesitate to attribute to 
 them all the value of a good ps3xhological observa- 
 tion.* 
 
 In examining the detailed narratives of other ec- 
 statics (which I cannot recount here), I find that for 
 our purposes may be conveniently established two cate- 
 gories. 
 
 In the first, motility persists to a certain extent. 
 The ecstatic follows in its development and reproduces 
 with appropriate movements the Passion, the Nativity, 
 or some other religious drama. There is a series of very 
 intense images, having an invariable point of departure, 
 an order of succession Avhich repeats itself each time 
 with perfect automatism. Maria von Moerl and Louise 
 Lateau are well known examples of this. 
 
 The other category is that of ecstasy in repose. 
 Ideas alone reign, ordinarily abstract or metaphysical : 
 God for St. Teresa and Plotinus, better still the Nir- 
 vana of the Buddhists. Movements are suppressed; 
 -henceforth one feels "only a residuum of interior agi- 
 tation." 
 
 * St. Teresa thus describes her physical state during her "raptures": 
 "Often my body became so light that it no longer possessed weight ; some 
 times it was so to such a point that I no more felt my feet touching the ground. 
 So long as the body is in the rapture, it remains as if dead and often is abso- 
 lutely powerless to act. It preserves the attitude in which it has been sur- 
 prised : thus it remains standing or seated, the hands open or closed, in a word 
 in the state in which it was overtaken by the rapture. Although ordinarily one 
 does not lose feeling, it has happened to me, however, to be entirely deprived 
 of it. This has been rare and has lasted only a very short time. Most fre- 
 quently feeling remains; but one experiences an indefinable trouble, and, al- 
 though it is impossible to perform any external act, one does not cease to 
 hear : it is like a confused sound coming from a distance. Moreover, even this 
 kind of hearing ceases when the rapture is at its highest degree." (Ibid., p. 
 206.) 
 
THE EXTINCTION OF THE WILL. loi 
 
 Let us remark in passing how well this agrees with 
 what has been previously said : that in abstract ideas 
 the tendency to movement is at its minimum ; that 
 these ideas being representations of representations, 
 pure schemata, the motor element is weakened in the 
 same degree as the representative element. 
 
 But in both cases the mental state of ecstas}' is a 
 complete infraction of the laws of the normal mechan- 
 ism of consciousness. Consciousness exists only under 
 the condition of a perpetual change ; it is essentially 
 discontinuous. An homogeneous and continuous con- 
 sciousness is an impossibilit}'. Ecstasy realises all 
 that is possible of this continuity; but St. Teresa has 
 just told us that either consciousness disappears, or 
 else understanding and memory — that is to say, dis- 
 continuity — come back at intervals and revive the con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 This psychological anomaly is complicated with 
 another. Every state of consciousness tends to expend 
 itself in proportion to its intensity. In the highest ec- 
 stas}', the expenditure is null or nearly so, and it is 
 thanks to the absence of this motor phase that the in- 
 tellectual intensity is maintained. The brain, in the 
 normal state an intellectual and motor organ at the 
 same time, ceases to be motor. Moreover, in the in- 
 tellectual order, the heterogeneous and manifold states 
 of consciousness which constitute the ordinary life 
 have disappeared. The sensations are suppressed ; 
 with them, the associations that they awaken. One 
 unique representation absorbs all. If the normal 
 psychic activity be compared to a circulating capital, 
 continually modified by receipts and expenses, it may 
 be said that here tlie capital is massed in one sum ; 
 diffusion becomes concentration, the extensive is trans- 
 
I02 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL, 
 
 formed into intensive. There is nothing astonishing 
 then, if in this state of intellectual erethism, the ec- 
 static appears transfigured, above herself. Certainly 
 the visions of the rude peasant girl of Sanderet who 
 saw a Virgin all of gold in a paradise of silver, have 
 little resemblance to those of a St. Teresa or a Ploti- 
 nus ; but every intellect at the moment of ecstasy yields 
 its maximum. 
 
 Is it very necessary now to investigate wh}^, in this 
 state, there is neither choice nor action? How could 
 there be choice, since choice supposes the existence of 
 that complex whole called the ego, which has disap- 
 peared ; since, the personality being reduced to one 
 idea or a single vision, there is no state which can be 
 chosen, that is to say, incorporated in the whole, to the 
 exclusion of others ; since, in a word, there is nothing 
 which can choose, nothing which can be chosen? As 
 well might an election be supposed without electors or 
 candidates. 
 
 Action is thus dried up in its source, annihilated. 
 There remain of it only the elementary forms (respira- 
 tory movements, etc. ), without which organic life would 
 be impossible. We have here a curious case of psy- 
 chological correlation or antagonism : all that one func- 
 tion gains is lost by another ; all that is gained by 
 thought is lost by movement. In this respect, ecstasy 
 is the opposite of the states in which motility triumphs, 
 such as epilepsy, chorea, and convulsions. Here, we 
 see a maximum of movement with minimum of con- 
 sciousness ; there, intensity of consciousness, with 
 minimum of movement. There is at any moment only 
 a certain nervous and psychic capital disponible; if it 
 be absorbed by one function, it is to the detriment of 
 
THE EXTINCTION OF THE WILL. 103 
 
 the others. Its employment in one direction or the 
 other depends on the nature of the individual. 
 
 After having studied the annihilation of the will in 
 its highest form, let us remark that in contemplation 
 and profound reflexion may be found modified and 
 diminishing forms of this annihilation. The inapti- 
 tude of contemplative minds for action has physiologi- 
 cal and psychological reasons of which ecstasy has 
 given us the secret. 
 
 It would be as interesting for the psjxhologist as 
 for the physiologist to know what produces abolition 
 of consciousness in natural or provoked somnambu- 
 lism, and from what organic conditions it results. 
 In spite of the labors carried on with ardor during 
 these last years there only exist theories on this point, 
 and one can take one's choice among several h}^- 
 potheses. Some, like Schneider and Berger, make 
 it a result of ''expectant attention," producing a one- 
 sided and abnormal concentration of consciousness. 
 Preyer sees in it a special case of his theory of sleep. 
 Others, like Rumpf, suppose that there are reflex 
 changes in the cerebral circulation, phenomena of 
 hypera:;mia and anaemia in the surface of the hemi- 
 spheres of the brain. Ilcidcnhain, wlio combats this 
 last theory, explains hypnotism by an inhibitive action. 
 There might take place a suspension of activity in the 
 cortical nerve-cells, perhaps by a change in molecular 
 arrangement : in this way the functional movement of 
 the grey matter would be interrupted. This last hy- 
 pothesis is that whicli appears to gain the most adher- 
 ents. As it is liardly more than a sinij)Ie statement of 
 
I04 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL, 
 
 fact, from the psychological point bf view at least, we 
 may adhere to it. 
 
 It would be useless to describe a state so often and 
 so carefully described before. "*' We simply remark 
 that the terms somnambulism, h3^pnotism, and their 
 analogues, do not designate a state identical every- 
 where and in all. This state varies in the same indi- 
 vidual from simple drowsiness to profound stupor ; 
 and from one individual to another, according to the 
 constitution, habit, pathological conditions, etc. So it 
 would be illegitimate to afi(irm that there is always 
 annihilation of the power of will. We shall see that 
 there are some very doubtful cases. 
 
 Let us first take hypnotism in the form that several 
 authors have called lethargic. The mental inertia is 
 absolute ; consciousness is abolished ; the reflexes are 
 exaggerated, an exaggeration which goes on concur- 
 rently with the enfeeblement of the higher activity. 
 At the voice of the operator the hypnotised subject 
 stands up, walks, sits down, sees absent persons, trav- 
 els, describes landscapes. He has, as the phrase goes, 
 no will but that of the operator. That signifies, in 
 more precise terms : In the empty field of conscious- 
 ness a state is called up ; and, as every state of con- 
 sciousness tends to pass into act, — immediately or 
 after having awakened associations, — the act ensues. 
 This is only one case of a well-known law which is the 
 analogue in the ps3xhological order of the reflex in 
 the physiological order ; and the passing into action is 
 here so much the easier as there is nothing to hinder 
 it, neither inhibitive power nor antagonistic state, the 
 suggested idea reigning alone in the slumbering con- 
 
 * See in particular the articles by Mr. Ch. Richet in i\\c Revue philoso- 
 phique for October and November, 1880, and for March, 1883. 
 
THE EXTiyCTIOX OF THE WILL. 105 
 
 sciousness. — Some facts stranger in appearance are 
 explained in the same wa}'. We know that by giving 
 to the members of a hypnotised person certain appro- 
 priate postures there is awakened in him an emotion 
 of pride, terror, humiHty, or piety; that if they are 
 placed in a position for climbing, he attempts to goiup 
 a ladder ; and that if there is put into his hands any 
 instrument of customary labor, he goes to work. It is 
 clear that the position imposed upon the members 
 awakens in the cerebral centres the corresponding 
 states of consciousness, with which they have become 
 associated by numerous repetitions. The idea once 
 awakened is in the same condition as that arising from 
 a command or a direct suggestion of the operator. All 
 these cases, therefore, are reducible to the same for- 
 mula : the hypnotised subject is an automaton which 
 is made to move according to the nature of its organi- 
 sation. There is an absolute annihilation of the will, 
 the conscious personality being reduced to one single 
 and unique state, which is neither chosen nor repu- 
 diated, but undergone, imposed. 
 
 In natural somnambulism the automatism is spon- 
 taneous, that is to say, it has as its antecedent some 
 particular excitation in the organism. Here the autom- 
 atism is often of a superior kind ; the series of states 
 aroused is long, and each term of the series is com- 
 plex. As a type of this there can be given the singer 
 whose history Mcsnct has related.* If one offer him 
 a cane that he takes for a gun, his military recollections 
 are revived ; he loads his weapon, lies flat upon his 
 stomach, takes careful aim and fires. If a roll of paper 
 be handed to him, the memories of his present calling 
 
 * De I'autotnatismt de l,i mimoirr et du souvenir dims U somnambuliime 
 ^thologique (Paris, 1874). See also P. Richer, op. cil., p. 391 et scqq. 
 
io6 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL. 
 
 are aroused ; he unrolls it and sings in a loud voice. 
 But the unvarying repetition each time of the same acts 
 in the same order, gives to all these facts the character 
 of a very clear automatism, from which all will is ex- 
 cluded. 
 
 There are, however, equivocal cases. Burdach tells 
 us of a ''very fine ode," composed in a state of som- 
 nambulism. The story has often been cited of that 
 abbe who, composing a sermon, corrected and touched 
 up his sentences, and changed the place of epithets. 
 Another person tries several times to commit suicide, 
 and at each attack employs new means. The facts of 
 this kind are so numerous that, even making allowance 
 for credulity and exaggeration, it is impossible to re- 
 ject them. 
 
 It may be said : Such acts suppose a comparison, 
 followed by a choice, a preference ; and this is what 
 is called a volition. There w^ould then exist a volun- 
 tary power, that is to say, a true reaction of the indi- 
 vidual — faint, obscure, limited, but active nevertheless. 
 
 But it can also be maintained that automatism by 
 itself is sufficient. Is it not a recognised truth that, 
 in the normal state, intellectual work is often automatic 
 and that it is only worth more on that account? What 
 poets call inspiration, is it not a cerebral labor which 
 is involuntary, almost unconscious, or which, at least, 
 reaches the consciousness only in the form of results? 
 We read over our own writings, and our corrections 
 are often spontaneous, that is to say, the movement of 
 thought brings a new association of words and ideas 
 which substitutes itself immediately for the other. So 
 it may be that the individual, as a being that chooses 
 and prefers, counts in it for nothing. On more minute 
 examination, it may be held that all these cases are not 
 
THE EXTINCTION OF THE WIIL. 107 
 
 rigorously comparable ; that, if for composing an ode 
 automatism suffices, for correcting it it does not suffice ; 
 and that, in this last case, there is a choice, however 
 rapid and insignificant we may suppose it to be. In 
 place of a zero of will, we should have a minimum of 
 will. This opinion would come to the same thing as the 
 first one, or would be separated from it only by a shade. 
 
 The reader may choose between these two inter- 
 pretations. I pass on to cases where the data are clearer. 
 
 There are among hypnotised subjects numerous 
 instances of resistance. An order is not obeyed, a 
 suggestion does not immediately impose itself. The 
 magnetisers of the last century recommended to the 
 operator a tone of authority and to the subject the 
 faith, the confidence which produces consent and pre- 
 vents resistance. 
 
 '* While in a state of somnambulism, B. performed 
 certain acts at command, but refused to perform others. 
 Most frequently she would not read, although we satis- 
 fied ourselves that she could see, in spite of the ap- 
 parent occlusion of the eyelids. . . . When her hands 
 were placed in the attitude of prayer her mind was im- 
 pressed accordingly. When questioned, she replied 
 that she was praying to the Holy Virgin, but that she 
 did not see her. As long as her hands remained in 
 that position, she continued her prayer and did not 
 disguise her displeasure if any one sought to distract 
 her. On displacing her hands, the prayer ceased im- 
 mediately. As inevitable as it is, the prayer, in this 
 case, is in some sort rational, since the patient resists 
 distractions and is able to carry on a discussion with 
 any one who tries to interrupt her." * 
 
 One of Ch. Richet's subjects who allowed liimself 
 
 * p. Richer, Etude sur thystfro-^piUpsiey pp. 426, 427. 
 
io8 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 without any difficulty to be metamorphosed into an 
 officer, a sailor, etc., refused on the contrary, with 
 tears in his eyes, to be changed into a priest ; which 
 the character and habits of the subject and the environ- 
 ment in which he had lived sufficiently explained. 
 
 There are, then, phases in which two states coex- 
 ist : one produced by an influence from without, the 
 other by an influence from within. We know the auto- 
 matic power of the first. Here the contrary state in- 
 terferes with it ; there exists something which resem- 
 bles a power of inhibition. But this power is so weak 
 that it ordinarily yields to repeated attacks, and so 
 vague that its nature cannot be determined. Is it more 
 than an antagonistic state of consciousness aroused by 
 the suggestion itself, in such wise that all would be 
 reduced to the coexistence of two contrary states? Is 
 it more complex, and must it be admitted that it rep- 
 resents the sum of the tendencies still existing in the 
 individual and some remains of what constitutes his 
 character? — If Heidenhain's theory be accepted there 
 must be, in the state called lethargic, a complete ar- 
 rest of the functional activity; the command or sug- 
 gestion would bring into play an exceedingly limited 
 number of neural elements in the cortical layer; finally, 
 in the state of resistance there would arise from their 
 sleep some of those elements which, in the normal state, 
 form the physiological and psychological basis of the in- 
 dividual, being the synthetic expression of its organism. 
 It must be avowed that, even admitting this second 
 h3^pothesis, what would remain of voluntary power, of 
 capacity in the individual to react according to his na- 
 ture would be an embryo, a power so denuded of effi- 
 cacy that it can hardly be called a will. 
 
 We would further remark that, if it is difficult for 
 
THE EXTiyCTION OF THE WILL. 109 
 
 the observer to divine what power of reaction persists 
 in the person who resists, the latter is a still worse 
 judge of it. 
 
 *'An attentive analysis of the phenomena, such as 
 can be made by educated and intelligent men, who 
 have consented to undergo the action of the magne- 
 tism, show how difficult it is even for the hypnotised 
 subject to make himself understand that he is not sim- 
 ulating. To make these observations the sleep need 
 not be very profound. ... At the period of lethargy^ 
 the consciousness is preserved, and yet a commence- 
 ment of automatism is very manifest. 
 
 *'A physician of Breslau had affirmed to Mr. Hei- 
 denhain that the magnetism made no impression upon 
 him ; but after he had been thrown into the lethargic 
 state he could not pronounce a single word. When 
 awakened, he declared that he could have spoken 
 easily enough and that, if he had said nothing, it was 
 because he had not wished to say an}thing. Being 
 lethargised anew by a few passes, he was again unable 
 to speak. He was awakened once more and had to 
 recognise that, if he had not spoken, it was because 
 he could not speak. 
 
 *'Oneof my friends, having been merely lethargised 
 and not altogether put to sleep, studied closely this 
 phenomenon of impotence coinciding with the illusion 
 of power. When I indicate to him a movement he 
 always executes it, even when before being magnetised 
 he had fully determined to resist me. This he has 
 the utmost difficulty in understanding on awakening. 
 * Certainly,' he said to me, 'I could resist, but I liave 
 not the will to do so.' So he is sometimes tempted to 
 believe that he is simulating. *When I am lethargised,' 
 he said to me, ' I feign automatism, although I could, 
 
no THE DISEASES OF THE WILL: 
 
 it seems to me, do otherwise. I come with the firm 
 determination not to pretend, and, in spite of myself, 
 as soon as the sleep begins it seems to me that I do it.' 
 It can be seen that this kind of simulation of a phe- 
 nomenon is absolutely indistinguishable from the real- 
 ity of that phenomenon. Automatism is proven by the 
 single fact that persons in good faith are unable to act 
 otherwise than as automata. It signifies little that 
 they imagine themselves able to resist. They do not 
 resist. That is the fact which should be taken into con- 
 sideration, and not the illusion that they cherish of 
 their alleged power of resistance." * 
 
 This power of resistance, however, as feeble as it 
 is, is not equal to zero ; it is a last survival of the in- 
 dividual reaction, extremely reduced ; it is on the 
 threshold of extinction, but without passing over it. 
 The illusion of this feeble power of inhibition must 
 correspond to some physiological state equally preca- 
 rious. Upon the whole, the state of natural or pro- 
 voked somnambulism may justly be regarded as an 
 abolition of the will. The exceptional cases are rare 
 and obscure ; yet they contribute their share of in- 
 struction. They show once more that volition is not 
 an invariable quantity, but that it decreases to a point 
 where it may be equally maintained either that it does 
 or does not exist. 
 
 I will mention in passing a fact which hardly enters 
 into the pathology of the will, but which furnishes 
 matter for reflexion. There may be given to certain 
 hypnotised subjects an order to perform an action later 
 on, at a given moment in the day, or even at a more 
 distant date (in eight, ten days). Having returned 
 to themselves they carry out the order at the hour re- 
 
 ♦ Ch. Richet, article cited, pp. 348, 349. 
 
THE EXTINCTION OF THE WILL, iii 
 
 quired, on the prescribed da}^ ordinarily declaring 
 "that they do not know why. " In some more curious 
 cases these persons give specious reasons to explain their 
 conduct, to justify this act which does not spring from 
 their own spontaneity, but is imposed upon them with- 
 out their knowledge. 
 
 I cite a case that came under my own observation. 
 A young man at ten o'clock ordered his mistress, who 
 was in the hypnotic state, to leave him at three o'clock 
 in the morning ; then he restored her to the normal 
 state. Toward three o'clock she awoke and made 
 ready to go, and though he begged her to stay, she 
 found reasons to excuse and justify her going at that 
 unreasonable hour.* 
 
 "Our illusion of free will," sa3's Spinoza, "is only 
 ignorance of the motives which make us act." Do not 
 this fact and analogous ones confirm this?f 
 
 ♦This paragraph, though left out of the eighth French edition, was pres- 
 ent in the early ones. It is retained for the sake of completeness. — Trans. 
 
 t The state of the will in hypnotised persons has given rise lately to very 
 warm discussions of much practical importance. We have seen that it is easy 
 during hypnosis to require of certain subjects acts which they are to perform 
 at a date determined. There is a complete forgetfulness of the injunction on 
 awakening and, as it would seem, up to the moment when the specified time 
 has come. Does not the hypnotised person thus become a passive instrument 
 in the operator's hands by the annihilation of his will ? 
 
 Two contrary opinions have been maintained. According to the School 
 of Nancy (Liebault, Beaunis, Bernheim, Li^geois) the confiscation of the will 
 is complete, and all resistance to the injunctions is vanquished in the long 
 run, in the freely suggestible person, who thus becomes pcrinde ac cadavi-r. 
 
 The School of Paris (Charcot, Brouardel, etc.) rejects this absolute theory, 
 "which rests only upon laboratory crimes " (that is to say, ones which are 
 factitious, simulated, executed for compliance sake). It maintains that re- 
 sistance is possible. Very weak, when the act commanded is a trivial one, it 
 would be augmented in proportion to the gravity of the act suggested. This 
 resistance might manifest itself in several manners : refusal to awaken if the 
 command is not revoked, sleep or crisis at the moment when it is to be car- 
 ried out, etc. " The hypnotised person executes only what he has no objection 
 to doing." For this discussion consult Beaunis, I^ somnambulisine prcn'oquf, 
 ^t^wn\\c\m, De la suggeition, fic.\ LitJgeois, De la sugf^cstioH ft du sottinambu- 
 lisme ; Pitres, Dfs suggestions hyPnotiquts ; Gilles de la Tourette, Lhypnotisme 
 €t Us itats analoguts, etc. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 I. 
 
 Having examined the various morbid types, let us 
 see whether a law can be discovered which sums up 
 the pathology of the will and throws some light upon 
 its normal state. 
 
 Volition exists only as a fact, that is to say, a choice 
 followed by acts. For it to be produced, certain con- 
 ditions are necessary. A lack of impulse or inhibition, 
 an exaggeration of automatic activity, of a tendenc}^ a 
 desire, a fixed idea, prevent it from existing for a mo- 
 ment, an hour, a day, or a period of life. The sum of 
 these conditions, necessary and sufBcient, may be called 
 will. In relation to the volitions it is a cause, although 
 it is itself a sum of effects, a resultant varying with its 
 elements ; pathology has demonstrated this to us. 
 
 These elements, which I indicate briefly, are : 
 
 i) The tendencies to action (or to inhibition) which 
 result from circumstances, from the environment, from 
 advice, from education ; in a word, all those which are 
 the effect of exterior causes. 
 
 2) The character, which is the principal element, 
 the effect of interior causes, and not an entity but the 
 resultant of that m^^riad of infinitel}^ minute states and 
 tendencies of all the anatomical elements which con- 
 
CONCLUSION. 113 
 
 stitutes a certain organism ; in shorter terms, charac- 
 ter is for us the psychological expression of a certain 
 organised body, drawing from it its peculiar coloring, 
 its special tone, and its relative permanence. That is 
 the ultimate stratum upon which rests the possibility 
 of the will, and which makes it energetic, weak, inter- 
 mittent, commonplace, extraordinary. 
 
 Now, if we consider the will no longer in its con- 
 stituent elements, but in the phases that it passes 
 through in forming itself, we see that volition is the 
 last term of a progressive evolution of which the sim- 
 ple reflex is the first round ; it is the highest form of 
 activity, — understood always in the precise sense of 
 power to produce acts, power of reaction. 
 
 It has for its basis a legacy from numberless gen- 
 erations, enregistered in the organism ; this is the 
 primitive automatic activity, simply co-ordinated, al- 
 most invariable, and unconscious, although it must in 
 remote ages have been accompanied by a rudiment of 
 consciousness which has withdrawn from it in propor- 
 tion as the co-ordination, becoming more perfect, has 
 organised itself in the species. 
 
 Upon this basis rests the conscious and individual 
 activity of the appetites, desires, feelings, and passions, 
 with a more complex and much less stable co-ordina- 
 tion. 
 
 Higher still is the idco-inotor activity, which in its 
 extreme manifestations attains a co-ordination at once 
 very firm and very complex, — this is complete volition. 
 
 It may therefore be said that it has as its fundamental 
 condition a JiirrdrcJiit co-ordination, that is to say, that 
 it does not suffice for reflexes to be co-ordinated with 
 reflexes, desires with desires, rational tendencies with 
 rational tendencies ; but that a co-ordination between 
 
114 THE DISEASES OE THE WILL. 
 
 these different groups is necessary, — a co-ordination 
 with subordination, such that all converges towards a 
 single point : the end to be attained. Let the reader 
 recall the morbid cases studied in the preceding pages, 
 in particular the irresistible impulses which, by them- 
 selves alone, represent almost the entire pathology of 
 the will, and he will recognise that they all may be re- 
 duced to this formula : absence of hierarchic co-ordina- 
 tion, action which is independent, irregular, isolated, 
 anarchical. 
 
 Hence if we consider the will either in its constit- 
 uent elements or in the successive phases of its gen- 
 esis (and the two aspects are inseparable), we see that 
 volition, its last result, is not an event appearing one 
 knows not whence, but that it plunges its roots into 
 the profoundest depths of the individual and, beyond 
 the individual, into the species, and into all species. 
 It does not come from above, but from below ; it is a 
 sublimation of inferior elements. I would compare 
 volition, once affirmed, to what is called in architec- 
 ture the keystone of an arch. To it the arch owes 
 more than its solidity, — its existence; but this stone 
 derives its power wholly from the others which sustain 
 it and shut it in, as in its turn it presses upon them 
 and holds them in place. 
 
 These much condensed preliminaries were indis- 
 pensable to an understanding of the law which governs 
 the dissolution of the will ; for, if the preceding con- 
 siderations are just, then since dissolution always fol- 
 lows the inverse order of evolution, it results that the 
 more complex manifestations of will must disappear 
 before the simpler ones, and the more simple before the 
 automatic activity. In order to give to the statement 
 of the law its exact form, treating volition, not as a 
 
CONCLUSION. 115 
 
 singular event, but as the highest manifestation of ac- 
 tivity, we will say : Dissoliitio?! pur sues a regressive 
 course from the more voluntary and 7nore complex toward 
 the less voluntary and simpler, that is to say, toward the 
 automatic. 
 
 We have now to show that this law is verified by 
 the facts. We have only to choose among many. 
 
 In 1868, Hughlings Jackson, while studying cer- 
 tain disorders of the nervous sj'stem, called attention, 
 for the first time I think, to the fact ''that the most 
 voluntary and specialised movements and faculties are 
 attacked first and more than the others."* This ** prin- 
 ciple of dissolution " or ''of reduction to a more auto- 
 matic state " was laid down by him as the correlative 
 of Herbert Spencer's doctrines regarding the evolution 
 of the nervous system. He takes one of the simplest 
 cases, general hemiplegia from lesion of the corpus 
 striatum. A clot of blood has made for us an experi- 
 ment. We see that the patient whose face, tongue, 
 arm, and leg are paralysed has lost the more voluntary 
 movements of a portion of his body, without losing the 
 more automatic ones. "The study of cases of hemi- 
 plegia shows us in effect that the external parts that 
 suffer the most are those which, psychologically speak- 
 ing, are the most under the command of the will, and 
 which, physiologically speaking, imply the greatest 
 number of different movements, produced with the 
 greatest number of different intervals, " in place of being 
 simultaneous like automatic movements. If the lesion 
 is more serious, and if it affect not only the more volun- 
 tary parts of the body (face, arm, leg), but those also 
 which are less voluntary (loss of certain movements of 
 
 * Clinical and Phyfiological Researches on the Nervous System (London, 
 1875)- 
 
ii6 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL 
 
 the 65^63 and of the head, and of one side of the chest), 
 the more voluntary parts are found to be much more 
 paralysed than the others. 
 
 Ferrier remarks* similarly that the general destruc- 
 tion of the motor region in the cortex of the brain, like 
 that of the corpus striatum, produces '^the same rela- 
 tive disorders of the different movements, those being 
 the most affected and paralysed which are most under 
 the influence of the will, at least after the first shock 
 is passed. Facial paralysis has its seat specially in 
 the lower facial region, attacking the more independent 
 movements, the frontal and orbicular muscles being 
 only slightly affected. The movements of the leg are 
 less affected than those of the arm, those of the arm 
 less than those of the hand.'' 
 
 The same author, drawing a distinction between 
 the different ki7ids of movements and their respective 
 centres, " those which imply consciousness and which 
 we call voluntary in the strict sense of the word " (the 
 higher cortical centres) and those ''which are described 
 as automatic, instinctive, responsive, including the mo- 
 tor adaptations of equilibrium and of motor co-ordina- 
 tion, and the instinctive expression of emotions, and 
 which are organised more or less completely in the cen- 
 tres subjacent to the cortex," observes that these latter 
 have a relative independence which is at a maximum in 
 the lower vertebrates (the frog, the pigeon), and at a 
 minimum in the monkey and the man. " I ventured to 
 predict," he adds, ''that in animals whose motor fac- 
 ulties did not seem to suffer much from a destructive 
 lesion of the nervous centres, those movements must 
 be paralysed which imply consciousness (voluntary 
 
 * Ferrier, Localisation of Diseases of the Brain (French translation, p. 
 
 142). 
 
CONCLUSION, \\1 
 
 movements) and are not automatically organised. This 
 has been fully confirmed by the researches of Goltz. 
 He has shown that, although the paw of a dog may 
 not be positively paralysed in so far as it is an organ of 
 locomotion, by a lesion of the cortex, it is so, in so far 
 as it serves as a hand and is employed as sueJi. " * 
 
 This last experiment is of the greatest interest for 
 us ; it shows us that, in one same organ adapted at 
 once to locomotion and to prehension, the firct function 
 persists, although impaired, when the latter, the more 
 delicate one, has disappeared. 
 
 The instability of the action that is voluntary, com- 
 plex, superior (which all comes to the same thing), in 
 comparison with the automatic, simple, inferior action, 
 shows itself again in a progressive form in the general 
 paralysis of the insane. ''The first imperfections of 
 motility," saysFoville, '' those which show themselves 
 as a barely incipient defect in the harmony of the mus- 
 cular contractions, are so much the more appreciable 
 as they concern more delicate movements, requiring a 
 greater precision and perfection in their performance. 
 So it is not astonishing that they express themselves 
 first in the very delicate muscular operations which 
 co-operate in phonation." It is known that an impedi- 
 ment in speech is one of the first symptoms of this 
 malady. At first so slight that only a practised ear 
 is capable of detecting it, the trouble in pronunciation 
 
 * Ferrier, pp. 36, 37. In the experiment of Goltz, if the lesion is made in 
 the left brain, in any movement in which the dog is accusloniml to use the 
 front paw as a hand, he neglects the use of the ri^ht paw. Thus he will hold 
 a bone with the left fore paw only ; and it is this paw only that he will use to 
 dig in the Rround or to reach up to his wound. If the animal has been trained 
 to give his paw on command, after the mutilation be will give only his left 
 paw, while he will hold the right one as if nailed to the ground. (Goltz, in 
 Dictionnaire tncyclopiJique des sciences fiiidicaUs, article " Nerveux," p. 588.) 
 
Ii8 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 increases progressively and finally results in an unin- 
 telligible jabber. 
 
 ''The muscles which contribute to articulation have 
 lost all their harmony of action ; they can no longer 
 contract except with effort ; and the speech has be- 
 come unrecognisable. 
 
 '*In the members, the lesions of motility affect at 
 first only the movements involving the most of minu- 
 tiae and of precision. The patient can take long walks 
 and use his arms in kinds of work which require only 
 co-ordinated movements ; but he can no longer execute 
 little delicate operations of the fingers, without trem- 
 bling a little and trying several times over ; it is par- 
 ticularly noticeable when he is asked to pick up a pin 
 from the ground, to wind his watch, etc. Artisans ac- 
 customed in their trade to tasks of precision, are in- 
 capacitated for occupation much sooner than those 
 who have only coarse labors to perform. When there 
 is writing to be done the pen is held with an indecision 
 which manifests itself by a more or less pronounced 
 irregularity of the characters traced. The farther the 
 malady progresses in its course the more tremulous 
 and irregular the hand-writing becomes ; so that, by 
 comparing a series of letters written at different epochs, 
 one may follow the successive stages of the affection 
 until the patient has become incapable of writing. 
 
 ''Later on, the indecision of the upper members 
 extends even to the general movements ; the trembling 
 and enfeeblement prevent the patient from carrying 
 his food directly to his mouth, from taking out his 
 handkerchief, from putting it back in his pocket, etc. 
 
 "In the lower members the progression is analo- 
 gous ; at the outset, the paralytic insane walk with 
 vigor when going straight ahead, but if they have to 
 
CONCLUSION: 119 
 
 turn to the right or the left, and especially to wheel 
 around in order to retrace their steps, the hesitation 
 and lack of precision make themselves apparent. Later 
 on, even when walking ahead, they advance with a 
 heavy and ill-coordinated step. Still later they have 
 difficulty in walking even a few steps." * 
 
 Let us recall again the troubles in motility which 
 follow the abuse of alcohol. Tremor is one of the earliest 
 phenomena. ''The hands are the first parts affected, 
 then the arms, the legs, the tongue and the lips. In pro- 
 portion as it increases, the tremulousness is generally 
 complicated with another graver disorder, muscular 
 debility. It affects at first the upper members ; that is 
 an almost constant character. The fingers become un- 
 skilful, awkward ; the hand holds objects imperfectly 
 and lets them slip. Then this weakness extends to the 
 forearm and the arm ; the patient is thus unable to use 
 his upper members except in a very imperfect way ; 
 he comes at last to be no longer able to eat alone. 
 Later these phenomena extend to the lower members ; 
 standing becomes difficult, the walk is uncertain, stag- 
 gering ; and all these symptoms go on increasing. The 
 muscles of the back are attacked in their turn .... 
 and the unfortunate paralytic is condemned to keep 
 his bed."t 
 
 We might recall again what takes place in convul- 
 sions, chorea, etc. This progress, which for the phy- 
 sician has only a clinical irftcrest, has for us a psycho- 
 logical interest. These facts of daily experience will 
 suffice, I hope, to produce the conviction, nay to dem- 
 onstrate, that the law of dissolution does indeed pursue 
 
 ♦ Foville, Dictionnaire df tnidtcine, etc., article " Paralysic Rdneralc," pp. 
 97-99- 
 * tFournier, ibid., article "Alcoholism," pp. 636, 637. 
 
I20 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL, 
 
 a course from the complex to the simple, from the 
 voluntary to the automatic, and that the last term of 
 evolution is the first of dissolution. We have studied 
 hitherto, it is true, only a disorganisation of move- 
 ments ; but those who treat psychology as a natural 
 science will find here nothing that needs to be restated. 
 As volition is not for us an imperative entity, reigning 
 in a world apart and distinct from its acts, but rather 
 the ultimate expression of a hierarchic co-ordination, 
 and as each movement or group of movements is rep- 
 resented in the neural centres, it is clear that with 
 each group that is paralysed one element of the co- 
 ordination disappears. If the dissolution is progres- 
 sive, the co-ordination, continually despoiled of some 
 element, will become continually more and more re- 
 stricted ; and, as experience shows that the disappear- 
 ance of the movements is in direct proportion to their 
 complexity and their delicacy, our thesis is verified. 
 We may moreover follow out this verification of our 
 law by recalling what takes place in the diseases of 
 speech, and here we penetrate into the inmost mechan- 
 ism of the mind. I shall not go over a subject that I 
 have treated at length.* I have endeavored to show 
 that many cases of aphasia result from a motor amnesia, 
 that Is to say, from aforgetfulness of motor elements, of 
 those movements which constitute articulate speech. I 
 will recall what Trousseau had already remarked, that 
 "aphasia Is always reducible to a loss of memory either 
 of the vocal signs, or of the means by which the words 
 are articulated; that W. Ogle also distinguishes two 
 verbal memories : a first one, recognised by everybody, 
 whereby we are conscious of the word, and a second in 
 
 * See Les maladies de la tnhnoire, p. 119 et seqq. (English translation, 
 vol. 41, International Scientific Series,) 
 
CONCLUSION. 121 
 
 addition, by which we are enabled to utter it." This 
 forgetfulness of the movements, ahhough it is pri- 
 marily a disease of the memory, reveals to us also a 
 weakening of motor power, a disorder of voluntary co- 
 ordination. The patient wishes to express himself ; 
 his volition has no result or expresses itself imper- 
 fectly, that is to say, the sum of the co ordinated ten- 
 dencies which at the present moment constitute the 
 individual in so far as he wishes to express himself, is 
 partially hindered in its passage into action ; and expe- 
 rience teaches us that this impotence of expression 
 first attacks the words, that is to say, rational language ; 
 afterwards the exclamatory phrases, the mterjections, 
 what Max Miiller designates by the name of emotional 
 language ; and finally, in very rare cases, the gestures 
 Here again, then, the dissolution proceeds from the 
 more complex to the less complex and the simple, from 
 the voluntary to the semi-voluntary and the automatic, 
 which latter is almost always left intact. 
 
 One might go farther still into the purely psychic life; 
 but here all becomes vague and uncertain. As we can 
 no longer connect each volition with a group of move- 
 ments of the vocal, locomotor, or prehensile organs, 
 we are in the dark. However, it is impossible not to 
 observe that the highest form of volition, voluntary 
 attention, is the rarest and most unstable of all. If, in 
 place of considering the voluntary attention* after the 
 fashion of the subjective psychologist who studies him- 
 self and goes no fartlicr, we consider it in the mass of 
 healthy adult human beings, in order to determine 
 approximately what part it takes in their mental life, 
 
 • It must be understood that there is no question of inroluntary attention, 
 which is natural, spontaneous ; we have, moreover, made ourselves clear else- 
 where on this point (see p. oi et seqq.). 
 
122 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 we shall see how rarely it occurs and for how short a 
 time. If it were possible for a given period of time to 
 compare in humanity, taken as a whole, the total num- 
 ber of acts produced by voluntary attention with the 
 total number of those produced without it, the ratio 
 would be nearly as zero to infinity. By reason of its 
 very superiority of nature and its extreme complexity, 
 it is a state, a co-ordination,* which can rarely come 
 into existence and which always tends to dissolution 
 as soon as it arises. 
 
 To confine ourselves to indubitable facts, is it not 
 well know^n that an incapacity for sustained attention is 
 one of the first symptoms of every impairment of the 
 mind, whether temporary, as in fever, or permanent, 
 as in madness? The highest form of co-ordination is 
 therefore indeed the most unstable, even in the purely 
 psychological order. 
 
 What is this law of dissolution, moreover, if not 
 one instance of that great biological law already de- 
 scribed in connexion with the memory : the functions 
 acquired last are the first to degenerate. In the indi- 
 vidual the automatic co-ordination precedes that born 
 of the desires and passions, which itself precedes vol- 
 untary co-ordination, the simple forms of which pre- 
 cede the more complex ones. In the development of 
 species (if the theory of evolution be admitted) the 
 lower forms of activity for ages existed alone ; then, 
 with the increasing complexity of the co-ordinations, 
 there came a time when there was will. A return to 
 the reign of impulses, by whatever brilliant qualities 
 
 *Just as groups of simple movements have to be organised and co-ordi- 
 nated to permit that higher co-ordination from which the delicate and com- 
 plex movements arise, in like manner must groups of simple states of con- 
 sciousness be organised, associated, and co-ordinated to permit that higher 
 co-ordination which is the attention. 
 
CONCLUSION. 123 
 
 of mind it may be accompanied, is therefore in itself a 
 retrogression. In this respect the following passage 
 from Herbert Spencer will serve us as a summary and 
 as a conclusion upon this point : *' In the chronically 
 nervous, whose blood, deteriorated in quality and feebly 
 propelled, fails to keep up a due activity of molecu- 
 lar change, . . . irascibility ... is matter of common 
 remark ; and irascibility implies a relative inactivity of 
 the superior feelings. It results when a sudden dis- 
 charge, sent by a pain or annoyance through those 
 plexuses which adjust the conduct to painful and aus 
 noying agencies, is unaccompanied by a discharge 
 through those plexuses which adjust the conduct to 
 many circumstances instead of a single circumstance. 
 That deficient genesis of nervous fluid accounts for 
 this loss of emotional balance, is a corollary from all 
 that has gone before. The plexuses which co-ordinate 
 the defensive and destructive activities, and in which 
 are seated the accompanying feelings of antagonism 
 and anger, are inherited from all antecedent races of 
 creatures and are therefore well organised — so well 
 organised that the child in arms shows them in action. 
 But the plexuses which, by connecting and co-ordinat- 
 ing a variety of inferior plexuses, adapt the behavior 
 to a variety of external acquirements, have been but 
 recently evolved ; so that, besides being extensive and 
 intricate, they are formed of much less permeable chan- 
 nels. Hence when the nervous system is not fully 
 charged, these latest and highest structures are the first 
 to fail. Instead of being instant to act, their actions, 
 if appreciable at all, come too late to check the actions 
 of the subordinate structures." * 
 
 * Princt/'Ut c/ Psychology, vol. i, S 2C1. 
 
124 ^-^^ DISEASES OF IHE WILL, 
 
 After having followed step by step the dissolution 
 of the will, the fundamental result which has appeared 
 to us to spring from it is that it is in a co-ordination 
 variable in complexity and degree ; that this co-ordi- 
 nation is the condition of the existence of all volition, 
 and that, according as it is totally or partially de- 
 stroyed, volition is annihilated or impaired. It is upon 
 this result that we would now like to insist, confining 
 ourselves to brief indications on certain points, as it 
 is not our aim to write a monograph of the will. 
 
 i) Let us examine in the first place the material 
 conditions of this co-ordination. The will, which in 
 some privileged persons attains a power so extraordi- 
 nary and does such great 'things, has a very humble 
 origin. This is found in that biological property in- 
 herent in all living matter and known as irritabilit}^, 
 that is to say, reaction against external forces. Irrita- 
 bility — the physiological form of the law of inertia — 
 is in somewise a state of primordial indifferentiation 
 whence shall spring, by an ulterior differentiation, sen- 
 sibility properly so called and motility, those two great 
 bases of psychic life. 
 
 Let us remember that motility (which alone con- 
 cerns us here) manifests itself, even in the vegetable 
 kingdom, under divers forms : b}^ the movements of 
 certain spores, of the sensitive plant, of the Diona'a, 
 and of man}^ other plants to which Darwin has devoted 
 a well-known work. — The protoplasmic mass, homo- 
 geneous in appearance, of which certain rudimentary 
 beings are exclusively composed, is endowed with mo- 
 tility. The amoeba and the white corpuscle of the 
 
CONCLUSION. 125 
 
 blood move ahead little by little by the aid of the pro- 
 cesses which they emit. These facts, which may be 
 found described in abundance in special works, show 
 us that motility appears long before the muscles and 
 the nervous system, even in their most rudimentary 
 form. 
 
 We need not follow the evolution of these two in- 
 struments of improvement through the animal series. 
 Let us merely note that the researches on the localisa- 
 tion of the motor centres, so important in the mecha- 
 nism of the will, have led some savants to study the 
 state of these centres in the newly born. ** This in- 
 vestigation, very carefully made by Soltmann, in 1875, 
 has furnished the following results. In rabbits and 
 dogs there exists immediately after birth no point in 
 the cerebral cortex the electric irritation of w-hich is 
 capable of producing movement. It is only on the 
 tenth day that the centres for the anterior members 
 develop. On the thirteenth day the centres for the 
 posterior members appear. On the sixteenth, these 
 centres are already quite distinct from each other 
 and from those of the face. One conclusion to be 
 drawn from these results is, that the absence of volun- 
 tary motor direction coincides with the absence of the 
 appropriate organs, and that, in measure as the ani- 
 mal becomes more master of its movements, the cere- 
 bral centres in which the elaboration of will takes 
 place acquire a more manifest independence.* 
 
 Flechsig and Parrot have studied the development 
 of the encephalon in the foetus and the infant. From 
 the researches of the latter t it appears that, if one fol- 
 
 • Pictionnaire encyclopidique ii<i sciences m^JicaliK, Franrois-Franck. ar- 
 ticle " Ncrveux," p. 585. 
 
 t Archives tie phyiiologie, 1879, pp. 505-520. 
 
126 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL, 
 
 lows the development of the white matter of an entire 
 hemisphere, it can be seen to rise successively from the 
 peduncle to the optic thalami, th^ to the internal cap- 
 sule, to the hemispheric centre, and finally to the cere- 
 bral mantle. So those parts whose development is the 
 slowest have the highest functional destiny. 
 
 The formative period passed, the mechanism of 
 volitional action appears to be constituted in the fol- 
 lowing manner : the incitation starts from the regions 
 of the cortical layer called motor (parieto-frontal re- 
 gion), and follows the pyramidal fasciculus, called vol- 
 untary by some authors. This fasciculus, which consists 
 in the grouping of all the fibres arising in the motor 
 convolutions, descends across the oval centre, forms a 
 small part of the internal capsule, which, as we know, 
 penetrates into the corpus striatum, ''like a wedge 
 into a piece of wood," This fasciculus follows the 
 cerebral peduncle and the medulla, where it undergoes 
 a more or less complete decussation, and passes down 
 the opposite side of the spinal cord, thus constituting 
 a great commissure between the motor convolutions 
 and the grey matter of the cord from which the motor 
 nerves are given out.* This rough sketch gives some 
 idea of the complexity of the elements requisite for 
 volitional action and the intimate solidarity which 
 unites them. 
 
 There are, unfortunately, some differences of inter- 
 pretation regarding the real nature of the cerebral cen- 
 tres whence the incitation starts. To Ferrier and many 
 others they are motor centres, in the strict sense ; that 
 is to say, that in them and by them the movement 
 
 *Huguenin, Anatomie des cent>es nerveux, (translated from the German 
 by Keller). Brissaud, De la contracture permanente des hemipUgiqucs, 1880, p. 
 9, at seq. 
 
CONCLUSION-. 127 
 
 commences. Schiff, Hitzig and Nothnagel, Charlton 
 Bastian, and Munk have given other interpretations 
 which are neither equally probable nor equally clear. 
 In general, however, they amount to a regarding of 
 these centres as rather of " a sensory nature," the mo- 
 tor function proper being relegated to the striated 
 bodies. '' The nervous fibres that descend from the 
 cerebral cortex, in higher animals and in man, down 
 to the corpora striata, are in their nature strictly com- 
 parable with the fibres connecting the * sensory' and 
 the 'motor' cells in an ordinary nervous mechanism 
 for reflex action."* In other words, there are sup- 
 posed to exist in the cerebral cortex *' circumscribed 
 regions the experimental excitation of which produces 
 in the opposite side of the body determinate localised 
 movements. These points seem as if they should 
 much rather be considered as centres of volujitary asso- 
 ciation than as motor centres, properly so called. They 
 would in this view be the seat of incitements to volun- 
 tary movements and not the true points of departure 
 of the motion. They ought rather to be assimilated to 
 the peripheral organs of sense than to the motor appa- 
 ratus of the anterior cornua of the medulla. . . . These 
 centres would then be psycho-ffioior, because by their 
 purely psychic action they command veritable motor 
 apparatus. . . . We believe that the different points 
 indicated as motor centres for the members, the face, 
 etc., correspond to the apparatus which receive and 
 transform into volunUiry incitation the sensations of 
 peripheral origin. They would thus be volitional cen- 
 tres and not true motor ones, "f 
 
 Notwithstanding this pen^ling question, tlie sulu- 
 
 • Charlton Bastian, Brain as an Organ 0/ the Mind, chapter xxvi. 
 t Franjois-Franck, loc. cit., pp. 577, 578. 
 
128 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL, 
 
 tion of which concerns psychology at least as much as 
 physiology, and in spite of disagreements in detail that 
 we have neglected, especially the uncertainties regard- 
 ing the function of the cerebellum, we may say with 
 Charltoji Bastian that, ''if since Hume's time we have 
 not learned in any full sense of the term ' the means by 
 which the motion of our bodies follows upon the com- 
 mand of our will, ' we have at least learned something as 
 to the parts chiefly concerned, and thus as to the paths 
 traversed by volitional stimuli."* 
 
 2) In examining the question on its psychological 
 side, volitional co-ordination assumes so many forms 
 and is susceptible of so many gradations that only its 
 principal stages can be noticed. It would be natural 
 to begin with the lowest ; but I think it useful, for the 
 sake of clearness, to follow the inverse order. 
 
 The most perfect co-ordination is that of the high- 
 est wills, of the great men of action, whatever be the 
 order of their activity: Caesar, or Michael Angelo, or 
 St. Vincent de Paul. It may be summed up in a few 
 words : unity, stability, power. The exterior unity of 
 their life is in the unity of their aim, always pursued, 
 creating according to circumstances new co-ordina- 
 tions and adaptations. But this outer unity is itself 
 only the expression of an interior unity, that of their 
 character. It is because they remain the same that 
 their end remains the same. Their fundamental ele- 
 ment is a mighty, inextinguishable passion which en- 
 lists their ideas in its service. This passion is them- 
 selves ; it is the psychic expression of their constitu- 
 tion as nature has made it. So all that lies outside of 
 this co-ordination, how it remains in the shade, ineffica- 
 cious, sterile, forgotten, like a parasitic vegetation ! 
 
 *Loc. cit. 
 
CONCLUSION. 129 
 
 They present the type of a life always in harmony with 
 itself, because in them everything conspires together, 
 converges, and consents. Even in ordinary life these 
 characters are met with, without making themselves 
 spoken of, because the elevation of aim, the circum- 
 stances, and especially the strength of the passion, have 
 been lacking to them ; they have preserved only its 
 stability. — In another way, the great historic stoics, 
 Epictetus, Thraseas, (I do not speak of their Sage, who 
 is only an abstract ideal,) have realised this superior 
 type of will under its negative form, — -inhibition, — con- 
 formably to the maxim of the school : Endure and re- 
 frain. 
 
 Below this perfect co-ordination, there are lives tra- 
 versed by intermission, whose centre of gravity, ordi- 
 narily stable, nevertheless oscillates from time to time. 
 One group of tendencies makes a temporary secession 
 with limited action, expressing, so far as they do exist 
 and act, one side of the character. Neither for them- 
 selves nor for others have these individuals the unity 
 of the great wills, and the more frequent and complex 
 in nature are these infractions of perfect co-ordination, 
 the more the volitional power diminishes. In reality, 
 all these degrees are met with. 
 
 Descending still lower, we reach those lives by 
 double entry, in which two contrary or merely different 
 tendencies dominate in turn. There are in the indi- 
 vidual two alternate centres of gravity, two points of 
 convergence for successively preponderating but only 
 partial co-ordinations. Taking everything together, that 
 is perhaps the most common type, if one looks around 
 one, and if one consults the poets and moralists of all 
 times, who vie with each other in repeating that there 
 are two men in us. The number of these successive 
 
130 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 co-ordinations may be still larger ; but it would be 
 idle to pursue this analysis further. 
 
 One step more, and we enter into pathology. Let 
 us recall the sudden irresistible impulses which at 
 every moment hold the will in check ; it is a hypertro- 
 phied tendency which continually breaks the equilib- 
 rium, and the intensity of which is too great to permit 
 it any longer to be co-ordinated with the others ; it 
 goes out of the ranks, it commands instead of being, 
 subordinated. Then when these impulses have come 
 to be no longer an accident but a habit, no longer one 
 side of the character but the character itself, there are 
 henceforth only intermittent co-ordinations ; it is the 
 will that becomes the exception. 
 
 Lower still, it becomes a mere accident. In the 
 indefinite succession of impulses varying from one 
 minute to the other a precarious volition finds with 
 difficulty at long intervals its conditions of existence. 
 Only caprices then exist. The hysteric character has 
 furnished the type of this perfect incodrdifiatiofi. Here 
 we reach the other extreme. 
 
 Beneath this there are no more diseases of the will, 
 but an arrest of development which prevents it from 
 ever arising. Such is the state of idiots and imbeciles. 
 We will say a few words regarding them here in order 
 to complete our pathological study. 
 
 '<In profound idiocy," says Griesinger, ''efforts 
 and determinations are always instinctive ; they are 
 chiefly provoked by the need of nourishment ; most 
 frequently they have the character of reflexes of which 
 the individual is hardly conscious. Certain simple 
 ideas may still provoke efforts and movements, for ex- 
 ample, to play with little pieces of paper. . . . Without 
 speaking of those who are plunged in the profoundest 
 
CONCLUSION. 131 
 
 idiocy, we ask ourselves : Is there in them anything 
 that represents the will ? What is there in them that 
 can will? 
 
 '* In many idiots of this last class the only thing 
 that seems to arouse their minds a little is the desire 
 to eat. The lowest idiots manifest this desire only by 
 agitation and groans. Those in whom the degeneracy 
 is less profound move their lips and hands a little, or 
 else weep : it is thus that they express a desire to 
 eat. . . . 
 
 '' In slight idiocy the foundation of the character 
 is inconstancy and obtuseness of feeling, and weakness 
 of will. The disposition of these individuals depends 
 upon their surroundings and the treatment they receive: 
 it is docile and obedient when they are taken care of, ill- 
 natured and malicious when they are badly treated."* 
 
 Before bringing this subject to an end, we will 
 again remark that if the will is a co-ordination, that is 
 to say a sum of relations, it may be predicted a priori 
 that it will be produced much more rarely than the 
 simpler forms of activity, because a complex state 
 has much fewer chances of originating and enduring 
 than a simple state. And such are the real facts in the 
 case. If in each human life we count up what should 
 be credited to the account of automatism, of habit, of 
 the passions, and above all of imitation, we shall see 
 that the number of acts that are purely voluntary, in 
 
 •Griesinger, Traiti des maladies meniaUs (translated from the German), 
 PP- 433. 434- For a complete study of the question consult the recent work by 
 Father Sollier : Psychologie de V idiot et de I'imbicile. It will be seen that in 
 them the will cannot be formed because the conditions of its existence are lack- 
 ing. The atrophy of the intellectual and afifective faculties renders the appari- 
 tion of voluntary activity impossible : which proves once more that it is not a 
 primordial "faculty," but an acquired and complex state resulting from an 
 evolution. These weak-minded persons cannot go beyond the period of reflexes, 
 affective and intellectual ; the world of will is a promb'.ed land into which 
 they will never enter. 
 
132 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 the strict sense of the word, is very small. For the 
 majority of men, imitation suffices ; they are contented 
 with what has been will in others, and, as they think 
 with the ideas of the world at large, they act with its 
 will. Between the habits which render it useless and 
 the maladies that mutilate or destroy it, the will, as 
 we have said above, must be taken as a happy acci- 
 dent. 
 
 Is it necessary, finally, to remark how close a re- 
 semblance there is between this increasingly complex 
 co-ordination of tendencies which forms the different 
 stages of the will, and the increasingly complex co- 
 ordination of perceptions and images which constitutes 
 the various degrees of the intellect, one having for its 
 basis and fundamental condition the character, and the 
 other the ''forms of thought"; both being a more or 
 less complete adaptation of the being to its environ- 
 ment, in the order of action or in the order of knowl- 
 edge? 
 
 * * 
 
 We are now prepared for the general conclusion of 
 this work, already indicated several times in passing. 
 It will illuminate, I trust, with a retrospective light 
 the road which we have traversed. 
 
 Volition is a final state of consciousness which re- 
 sults from the more or less complex co-ordination of a 
 group of states, conscious, subconscious, or uncon- 
 scious (purely physiological), which all united express 
 themselves by an action or an inhibition. The princi- 
 pal factor in the co-ordination is the character, which 
 is only the psychic expression of an individual organ- 
 ism. It is the character which gives to the co-ordina- 
 tion its unity, — not the abstract unity of a mathemat- 
 ical point, but the concrete unity of a consensus. The 
 
CONCLUSION. 133 
 
 act by which this co-ordination is made and affirmed 
 is choice, founded on an affinity of nature. 
 
 The volition that subjective psychologists have so 
 often observed, analj^sed, and commented upon is then 
 for us only a simple state of consciousness. It is merely 
 an effect of that psycho-physiological activity, so often 
 described, only a part of which enters into conscious- 
 ness under the form of a deliberation. Furthermore, 
 /■/ is 7iot the cause of anything. The acts and movements 
 which follow it result directly from the tendencies, feel- 
 ings, images, and ideas which have become co-ordinated 
 in the form of a choice. It is from this group that all 
 the efficacy comes. In other terms, — and to leave no 
 ambiguity, — the psycho-physiological labor of delib- 
 eration results on the one hand in a stat'e of conscious- 
 ness, the volition, and on the other in a set of move- 
 ments or inhibitions. The ''/ wilP^ testifies to a con- 
 dition, but does ?wt produce it. I should compare it 
 to the verdict of a jury, which may be the result of a 
 very long criminal examination, and of very passionate 
 pleadings, and which will be followed by grave conse- 
 quences extending over a long future, but which is an 
 effect without being a cause, being in law only a simple 
 statement. 
 
 If one insists on making of the will a faculty, an 
 entity, all becomes obscurity, perplexity, contradiction. 
 One is caught in the snare of a badly stated question. 
 If, on the contrary, we accept the facts as they are, we 
 disembarrass ourselves at least of factitious difficul- 
 ties. One does not have to ask oneself, like Hume 
 and so many others, how an *'I will" can make my 
 members move. This is a mystery which need not be 
 cleared up, since it docs not exist, as volition is in no 
 degree a cause. It is in the natural tendency of feel- 
 
134 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 ings and images to express themselves in movements 
 that the secret of acts produced should be sought. We 
 have here only an extremely complicated case of the law 
 of reflexes, in which, between the period called that 
 of excitation and the motor period there appears a 
 most important psychic fact — volition — showing that 
 the first period is ending and the second beginning. 
 
 Let it be remarked also how easily that strange 
 malady called abulia can now be explained, and with 
 it the analogous forms considered above,* and even 
 that mere weakness of will, scarcely morbid, so frequent 
 among persons who say that they will and yet do not 
 act. It is because the individual organism, the source 
 from which all springs, had two effects to produce and 
 produces only one of them : the state of consciousness, 
 choice, affirmation ; while the motor tendencies are 
 too- weak to express themselves in acts. There is suf- 
 ficient co-ordination, but insufficient impulse. In irre- 
 sistible acts, on the contrary, it is the impulse which is 
 exaggerated, and the co-ordination which grows weak 
 or disappears. 
 
 We owe, therefore, to pathology two principal re- 
 sults : one, that the '' I will " is in itself wholly with- 
 out efficacy in causing^ action ; the other, that the will 
 in the rational man is an extremely complex and un- 
 stable co-ordination, fragile by its very superiority, 
 because it is ''the highest force which nature has yet 
 developed — the last consummate blossom of all her 
 marvellous works, "f 
 
 * See chapter i. 
 
 tMaudsIey, The Physiology of Mind, p. 456, 
 
 v/ 
 
THE OPEN COURT 
 
 A WEEKLY MAGAZINE 
 
 DEVOTED TO THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE 
 
 THE OPEN COURT does not understand by religion any creed or dog- 
 matic belief, but man's world-conception in so far as it regulates his conduct. 
 
 The old dogmatic conception of religion is based upon the science of 
 past ages; to base religion upon the maturest and truest thought of the 
 present time is the object of The Open Court. Thus, the religion of The Open 
 Court is the Religion of Science, that is, the religion of verified and verifiable 
 truth. 
 
 Although opposed to irrational orthodoxy and narrow bigotry, The Open 
 Court does not attack the properly religious element of the various religions. 
 It criticises their errors unflinchingly but without animosity, and endeavors 
 to preserve of them all that is true and good. 
 
 The current numbers of The Open Court contain valuable original articles 
 from the pens of distinguished thinkers. Accurate and authorised transla- 
 tions are made in Philosophy, Science, and Criticism from the periodical 
 literature of Continental Europe, and reviews of noteworthy recent investi- 
 gations are presented. 
 
 Terms : Two dollars a year throughout the Postal Union. Single Copies 
 5 cents. 
 
 THE MONIST 
 
 A QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF 
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE 
 
 THE MONIST discusses the fundamental problems of Philosophy in 
 their practical relations to the religious, ethical, and sociological questions 
 of the day. Among its contributors are : 
 
 Charles S. Peirce, Prof. G. J. Romanes, Prof. C. Lombroso, 
 
 Prof. Joseph Lk Conte, Prof. C. Lloyd Morgan, Prof. E. Haeckel, 
 Dr. VV. T. Harris, James Sully, Prof. H. HOffding, 
 
 Prof. Joseph Lk Conte, Prof. C. Lloyd Morgan, Prof. E. Haeckel, 
 
 W. T. Harris, James Sui 
 
 M. D. Conway, B. Bosanquet, Dr. F. Oswald, 
 
 Prof. F. Max MOller, Dr. A. Binet, Prof. J. Delbceuf. 
 
 Prof. E. D. Cope, Prof. Ernst Mach, Prof. F. Jodl, 
 
 Carl'S Sterne, Rabbi Emil Hirsch, Prof. H. M. Stanley, 
 
 Mrs.C. Ladd Franklin, Lester F. Ward, G. Ferrero, 
 
 Prof. Max V'erworn, Prof. H. Schubert, J. Venn, 
 
 Pf 
 
 Prof. Felix Klein, Dr. Edm. Montgomery, Prof. H. von Holst. 
 
 Per Copy. 50 cents ; Yearlv $2.00. In England and all countries in U.P.U 
 per Copy 2s. 6d.; Yearly 9s. 6n. 
 
 CHICAGO . 
 
 THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO., 
 
 Monon Building, 324 Dearborn Street. 
 London: WATTS & CO., 17 Johnson's Court, Fleet St., E.G. 
 
CATALOGUE OF PUBLICATIONS 
 
 OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO. 
 
 MULLER, F. MAX. 
 
 THREE INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF 
 THOUGHT. 
 With a correspondence on "Thought Without Words," between F. 
 Max Miiller and Francis Galton, the Duke of Argyll, George J. Ro- 
 - manes and others. 128 pages. Cloth, 75 cents. 
 
 THREE LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 
 
 The Oxford University Extension Lectures, with a Supplement, " My 
 Predecessors, " an essay on the genesis of " The Science of Thought. ' ' 
 112 pages. Cloth, 75 cents. 
 
 ROMANES, GEORGE JOHN. 
 
 DARWIN AND AFTER DARWIN. 
 
 An Exposition of the Darwinian Theory and a Discussion of Post- 
 Darwinian Questions. 
 
 1. The Darwinian Theory. 
 
 460 pages. 125 illustrations. Cloth, $2.00. 
 
 2. Post-Darwinian Questions. 
 
 (In preparation.) 
 
 AN EXAMINATION OF WEISMANNISM. 
 236 pages. Cloth, $1.00. 
 
 RIBOT, TH. 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATTENTION. 
 
 Authorised translation, 121 pages. Cloth, 75 cents. 
 
 THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. 
 
 Authorised translation, 157 pages. Cloth, 75 cents. 
 
 THE DISEASES OF THE WILL. 
 
 Authorised translation, 134 pages. Cloth, 75 cents. 
 
 MACH, ERNST. 
 
 THE SCIENCE OF MECHANICS. 
 
 A Critical and Historical Exposition of its Principles. Translated 
 from the second German edition by Thomas J. McCormack, with 250 
 cuts and illustrations, marginal analyses, and a complete index. 518 
 pages. Half morocco, gilt top. Price, $2.50. 
 
 POPULAR SCIENTIFIC LECTURES. 
 (In preparation.) 
 
 FREYTAG, GUSTAV. 
 
 THE LOST MANUSCRIPT. 
 
 A Novel. Authorised translation from the Sixteenth German Edition 
 Two volumes. 953 pages. Extra cloth, gilt top, $4.00 ; the same in 
 one volume, cloth, 81.00; paper, 75 cents. 
 
 BINET, ALFRED. 
 
 THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF MICRO-ORGANISMS. 
 
 Authorised translation. 135 pages. Cloth, 75 cents ; Paper, 50 cents. 
 
 ON DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 New Studies in Experimental Psychology. 93 pages. Paper, 50 cents. 
 
TRUMBULL, M. M. 
 
 THE FREE TRADE STRUGGLE IN ENGLAND. 
 
 Second Edition, revised and enlarged. 296 pages. Cloth, 75 cents ; 
 paper, 25 cents. 
 
 WHEELBARROW: Articles and Discussions on the Labor Question. 
 With portrait of the author. 300 pages. Cloth, Si. 00; paper, 50 cents. 
 
 EARL GREY ON RECIPROCITY AND CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 
 With Comments by Gen. M. M. Trumbull. Price, 10 cents. 
 
 CARUS, PAUL. 
 
 THE ETHICAL PROBLEM. * 
 
 Three lectures delivered at the invitation of the Board of Trustees be- 
 fore the Society for Ethical Culture of Chicago, in June, 1890. 90 pages. 
 Cloth, 50 cents ; Paper, 30 cents. 
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS. 
 
 The Method of Philosophy as a Systematic Arrangement of Knowl- 
 edge. Second edition, enlarged and revised. 372 pages. Cloth, $1.50. 
 
 HOMILIES OF SCIENCE. 
 
 310 pages. Cloth, Gilt Top, Si. 50. 
 
 THE IDEA OF GOD. 
 
 A disquisition upon the development of the idea of God. 32 pages. 
 Paper, 15 cents. 
 
 THE SOUL OF MAN. 
 
 An Investigation of the Facts of Physiological and Experimental Psy- 
 chology. With 152 cuts and diagrams. 458 pages. Cloth, $3.00. 
 
 TRUTH IN FICTION. Twelve Tales with a Moral. 
 
 Printed on fine laid paper, white and gold binding, gilt edges, 128 
 pages. Price, Si. 00. 
 
 THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE. 
 Extra edition. Price, 50 cents. 
 
 PRIMER OF PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 A popular exposition of the fundamental notions of philosophy. 240 
 pages. Cloth, Si. 00. 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF BUDDHA. 
 (In preparation.) 
 
 GARBE, RICHARD. 
 
 THE REDEMPTION OF THE BRAHMAN. A Tale ok Hindu Life. 
 Laid paper. Veg. parch, binding. Gilt top. 96 pages. Price, 75 cents. 
 
 EPITOMES OF THREE SCIENCES. 
 
 1. COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY. The Study of Sanskrit. 
 
 By Prof. H. Oldenberg, of the University of Kiel. 
 
 2. EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY. 
 
 By Prof. Joseph Jastrow, of the University of Wisconsin. 
 
 3. OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY; or, The Rise ok the People ok 
 
 Israel. 
 By Prof. C. H. Cornill, of the University of KOnigsherg, with especial 
 introductions by Professors Oldenberg and Cornill and prefatory re- 
 marks by the Editor of The Open Court. 140 pages. Cloth, 75 cents. 
 
 THE OPEN COURT PUBLISIILXG CO., 
 
 770 MONON BUILDING, l^^ DEARBORN STREET, CHICAGO 
 
The Religion of Science Library, 
 
 A collection of bi-monthly reprints of books and articles here- 
 tofore published in The Open Court. Yearly, $1.50; single num- 
 bers, 25 cents. The books will be printed upon good paper, from 
 large type. 
 
 The f ollov^ing have already appeared in the series : 
 
 1. July, 1893. The Religion of Science. By Paul Carus. 
 
 2. Sept., 1893. Three Introductory Lectures on the Science of 
 
 Thought. By F. Max Muller. 
 
 3. Nov., 1893. Three Lectures on the Science of Language. By 
 
 F. Max Muller. 
 
 4. Jan., 1894. The Diseases of Personality. By Th. RiBOT. 
 
 5. Mar,, 1894. The Psychology of Attention. By Th Ribot. 
 
 The following are in preparation : 
 
 The Diseases of the Will. By Th. Ribot. 
 
 The Lost Manuscript. A Novel. By Gustav Freytag. 
 
 The Study of Sanskrit. By Prof. H. Oldenberg. 
 
 Old Testament History. By Prof. C. H. Cornill. 
 
 The Ethical Problem. By Paul Carus. 
 
 The Origin of Language, and The Origin of Reason. By Ludwig 
 Noire. 
 
 Memory as a General Function of Organised Matter, and The Spe- 
 cific Energies of the Nervous System, etc. By Prof. Ewald 
 Hering. 
 
 On Double Consciousness, and The Psychic Life of Micro-Organ- 
 isms. By Alfred Binet. 
 
 Fundamental Problems, and other works. By Paul Carus. 
 
 THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO., 
 
 770 MoNON Building, 
 324 DEARBORN ST. CHICAGO, ILL. 
 
Deacidified using the Bookkeeper procc-- 
 Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxidc 
 Treatment Date: Nov. 2004 
 
 PreservationTechnologies 
 
 A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 
 
 1 1 1 Thomson Park Onvo 
 Cranberry Township. PA 1C066 
 (724)779-2111