Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [99]
The empirical self has several components: the material self (our body, clothing, possessions, family, home); the social self or selves (who we are and how we behave in relation to the different people in our lives—an anticipation of social psychology, which would not emerge as a specialty for decades); and the spiritual self, a person’s inner or subjective being, his entire collection of psychic faculties or dispositions. All these can be explored by introspection and observation; the empirical self is, after all, researchable.
But this still leaves unsolved that most puzzling puzzle of all. What accounts for the sense of me-ness, selfhood, and identity, the sure knowledge that I am who I was a while ago? James identified such thoughts as belonging to the “pure Ego,” a wholly subjective phenomenon, and suggested that its perception of continuing personal identity arises from the continuity of the stream of consciousness: “Resemblance among the parts of a continuum of feelings (especially bodily feelings)… constitutes the real and verifiable ‘personal identity’ which we feel.”36
This being so, James said, psychology need not postulate a watcher or soul that observes the knowing mind and maintains a sense of identity: “[The soul] is at all events needless for expressing the actual subjective phenomena of consciousness as they appear.”37 He stated this powerful conclusion even more forcefully in Jimmy:
The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist; but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.38
Will: Some commentators say that James’s most valuable contribution to psychology was his theory of the will, the conscious process that directs voluntary movements.39
Much of James’s discussion of the will in Principles was neurophysiological, dealing with how the will generates the nerve impulses that produce the desired muscular movements. But the far more interesting question he took up was how we come to will any act in the first place. The key factor, in his view, was a supply of information and experience about our ability to achieve a desired end:
We desire to feel, to have, to do, all sorts of things which at the moment are not felt, had, or done. If with the desire there goes a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply wish; but if we believe that the end is in our power, we will that the desired feeling, having, or doing shall be real; and real it presently becomes, either immediately upon the willing or after certain preliminaries have been fulfilled.40
How do we sense that the end is in our power? Through experience; through the knowledge of what different actions of ours would achieve: “A supply of ideas of the various movements that are possible, left in the memory by experiences of their involuntary performance, is thus the first prerequisite of the voluntary life.”41 Infants trying to grasp a toy make numerous random movements of their arms and hands, and sooner or later connect with the toy; they eventually become capable of willing the proper movement. In analogous fashion, adults accumulate a vast repertoire of ideas of different actions and their probable consequences; we walk, talk, eat, and perform myriad other activities by willing the appropriate actions and achieving the desired ends.
Much of the time we will our routine actions unhesitatingly, because we feel no conflict about what we want to do. But at other times conflicting notions exist in our mind: we want to do A but we also want to do B, its contrary. In such cases, what determines which action we will? James’s answer: we weigh the possibilities against each other, decide to ignore all but one, and thereby let that one become the reality. When we have made the choice, the will takes over; or perhaps one could say, Choosing which idea to ignore and which to attend