Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [100]
James gave one of his inimitably personal examples. He is lying abed of a chilly morning, he says, knowing how late he will be if he does not get up and what duties will remain undone, but hating the way getting up will feel and preferring the way staying in bed feels. At last he deliberately inhibits all thoughts except that of what he must do that day— and lo and behold, the thought, made the center of his attention, produces the appropriate movements and he is up and out of bed.43 “The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind… Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will.”44
Sometimes making the choice is instant and simple, sometimes protracted and the result of deliberation, reasoning, and decision making. Whatever the process, in every case the mind is a cause of behavior, an intervenor in cause-and-effect relationships, and not an automaton responding passively to outside influences. Voluntary action implies freedom of the will.
James himself, as we know, had come to believe in free will during his emotional crisis; that belief had enabled him to climb out of his Slough of Despond. But he still had to reconcile that belief with the basic tenet of scientific psychology: All behavior is, or ultimately will be, explicable, and every act has its causes. If every act is the result of determinable causes, how can there be any freedom for us to choose one of several possible, not wholly determined, futures? Yet we all experience what feels like freedom of will every time we make a decision to do, or not to do, anything, however trifling or however weighty.
James was utterly candid: “My own belief is that the question of free-will is insoluble on strictly psychologic grounds.” The psychologist wants to build a science, and a science is a system of fixed relations, but free will is not a fixed and calculable relationship; it is beyond science and so is best left to metaphysics. Psychology will be psychology, whether free will is real or not.45
But he insisted that a belief in free will is pragmatically sensible and necessary. He developed his philosophy of pragmatism after turning away from psychology, but its seeds exist in Principles. James’s pragmatism does not say, as crude oversimplifications of it aver, that “truth is what works”; it does say that if we compare the implications of opposed solutions to a problem, we can choose which one to believe in and act on.46 To believe in total determinism would make us passive and impotent; to believe in free will allows us to consider alternatives, to plan, and to act on our plans. It is thus practical and realistic:
The brain is an instrument of possibilities, but of no certainties. But the consciousness, with its own ends present to it, and knowing also well which possibilities lead thereto and which away, will, if endowed with causal efficacy, reinforce the favorable possibilities and repress the unfavorable or indifferent ones…If [consciousness] is useful, it must be so through its causal efficaciousness, and the automaton-theory must succumb to the theory of commonsense.47
As solid and enduring as these observations are, some parts of James’s discussion of will sound curiously old-fashioned today. In his discussions of “unhealthiness of will,” the “exaggerated impulsion” of the alcoholic or the drug user, or the “obstructed will” of the immobilized person, one hears genuine compassion for people in a diseased state—and overtones of moralistic disapproval:
No class of [persons] have better sentiments or feel more constantly the difference between the higher and the lower path in life than the hopeless failures, the sentimentalists, the drunkards, the schemers, the “dead-beats,” whose life is one long contradiction between knowledge and action, and who, with full command of theory, never get to holding their limp characters erect.48
James’s psychology of will was an important feature of American psychology for some years,