Humanity’s First Exam1850–1940 ⇄ now

1890 · English · United States

The Principles of Psychology

William James

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Passage selected for Humanity's First Exam
When a man has let himself go time after time, he easily becomes impressed with the enormously preponderating influence of circumstances, hereditary habits, and temporary bodily dispositions over what might seem a spontaneity born for the occasion. “All is fate,” he then says; “all is resultant of what pre-exists. Even if the moment seems original, it is but the instable molecules passively tumbling in their preappointed way. It is hopeless to resist the drift, vain to look for any new force coming in; and less, perhaps, than anywhere else under the sun is there anything really mine in the decisions which I make.” This is really no argument for simple determinism. There runs throughout it the sense of a force which might make things otherwise from one moment to another, if it were only strong enough to breast the tide. A person who feels the impotence of free effort in this way has the acutest notion of what is meant by it, and of its possible independent power.

Will · p. 574 · line 42369

2 selected passages and classifications

Passage 1

Every actually existing consciousness seems to itself at any rate to be a fighter for ends, of which many, but for its presence, would not be ends at all. Its powers of cognition are mainly subservient to these ends, discerning which facts further them and which do not. Now let consciousness only be what it seems to itself, and it will help an instable brain to compass its proper ends. The movements of the brain per se yield the means of attaining these ends mechanically, but only out of a lot of other ends, if so they may be called, which are not the proper ones of the animal, but often quite opposed. 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.
Free will and automatismCognition, attention, and judgmentautomatism · rejectseffective will · advancesselection and judgment · advancesMetaphysics of mind and lifeMeaning, experience, and interpretationEnlarges autonomyIndividualMind and body

James argues that consciousness makes a causal difference by selecting among mechanically available possibilities in light of an organism’s ends.

Chapter V, “The Automaton-Theory,” pp. 141–42

Passage 2

All the facts of the natural history of consciousness lend color to this view. Consciousness, for example, is only intense when nerve-processes are hesitant. In rapid, automatic, habitual action it sinks to a minimum. Nothing could be more fitting than this, if consciousness have the teleological function we suppose; nothing more meaningless, if not. Habitual actions are certain, and being in no danger of going astray from their end, need no extraneous help. In hesitant action, there seem many alternative possibilities of final nervous discharge. The feeling awakened by the nascent excitement of each alternative nerve-tract seems by its attractive or repulsive quality to determine whether the excitement shall abort or shall become complete. Where indecision is great, as before a dangerous leap, consciousness is agonizingly intense. Feeling, from this point of view, may be likened to a cross-section of the chain of nervous discharge, ascertaining the links already laid down, and groping among the fresh ends presented to it for the one which seems best to fit the case.
Habit and self-commandCognition, attention, and judgmentFree will and automatismselection and judgment · advanceseffective will · advancesScientific or empirical evidenceMetaphysics of mind and lifeEnlarges autonomyIndividualMind and body

James contrasts automatic habit with moments of hesitation, where feeling and consciousness select among genuinely competing courses of action.

Chapter V, “The Automaton-Theory,” pp. 142–43

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