the water; before I did not. What makes the difference? Can we say, ‘Yes, now I drink because the perceived water suggests ideas of pleasure, and the ideas suggest (directly or through their feelings) the activities with which their archetypes were connected’; or otherwise, ‘The pain of thirst suggests through the water the relief from pain, which is the idea of a pleasure, and that suggests the action, and so I drink’? All this again (apart from other objections[1]) would be an inaccurate description of the facts.
It is not true as a matter of fact that in the second case, where I drink, the water has ideas associated with it which it had not associated with it in the first case, where I did not drink. And the whole phraseology is both clumsy and misleading. In more ordinary language this is what really happens. Water has a certain meaning to me; and, when I see water and recognize it, I can have before my mind either all its meaning or only a part. One part of that meaning is that water quenches thirst; i.e. it contains the ideas of certain activities, results, and feelings. These ideas, in the first case, we purposely called up; they were there, and yet that did not move us to drink. In the second case we are moved to drink, but the question is, when we want the water, have we any more ideas than when we did not? ‘Yes,’ we shall be told, ‘you have now the idea of pleasure to be had by drinking, and therefore you drink: that is the new idea, and before you did not drink because you did not have it, or did not have it strong enough.’ Taking the last part first, if it were true that we had the idea of future pleasure, then weak and now strong, and it was
- ↑ We are not here concerned with the lowest stages of the will, but we may remark that the ‘association’ theory is not only helpless before the fact that uneasiness and pain are stimuli to action, and is driven by it to open inconsistencies or palpable fictions (let the reader peruse Bain, Emotions, Ed. ii. pp. 312-13; Ed. iii. pp. 316-18); but that also the real thesis with which it stands and falls, viz. the general priority of activity to all feeling, it fails even to recognize as the vital question, and obscures it by showing, what is nothing to the point, the priority of general activity to the special sensations of the senses (Emotions, 303). But if the discharge of energy from the physical centre (lower or higher) be preceded by any specific feeling, and accompanied by any specific feeling, then, if this is so, surely here is the place to look for the psychical genesis of the will, and not in the unverified postulate of a discharge, not felt in its origin or itself, and yet followed by pleasure.
