The Diseases of the Will

📖 The Scoop

In the Humboldt Library Mr. Fitzgerald places before the public the results of the latest thought and labor of the scientific world. This enterprize cannot be too highly commended from the standpoint of the public instructor and lover of knowledge. If the masses are ever to become acquainted with the laws of their being, such a publication as the Humboldt Library will prove a powerful agency in accomplishing the desirable result.
M. Ribot has the merit of stating, in clear and comprehensible language, the facts, doctrines, and hypotheses of modern metaphysics, so that the average reader may be easily introduced to perhaps the most important of all sciences. In this, and other essays on these subjects, M. Ribot pursues the inductive method, studying the mind as it is exhibited in the normal and abnormal types which are accessible everywhere. The important aid to be derived from pathology in mental science is well known. M. Ribot arranges the diseases of the will into several heads, viz: 1. lack of impulsion, as seen in irresolution; 2. excess of impulsion; 3, impairment of voluntary intelligence; 4, caprice; and 5, extinction of will. Under the last head he treats of ecstasy, nirvana, hypnotism, etc. The author shows the intermediary character of the will, that it is not only a cause, but also an effect, thus denying the ordinary form of so-called "freedom of the will." It is difficult to perceive the utility of the word will in this doctrine. As the outcome of a stimulus which has passed through more or less complex emotive or ratiocinative processes, action is only the movement of the last ball in a series in which the first one has been struck a blow. At best the word can only be used to represent a convenient fiction, supposing this doctrine to express all there is of will in the human mind.
A short paragraph expresses incidentally the author's views as to the origin of the mechanism whose action expresses human motives and human intelligence. I quote it as being in consonance with views often expressed by the present writer, but opposed to those held by many of the physiological metaphysicians of the present day: "The will has for its basis a legacy coming down from generations innumerable, and registered in the organism, namely, primordial automatic activity, which is almost invariable, and quite unconscious, although in the distant past it must have been accompanied by a rudiment of consciousness which later faded away, in proportion as coordination, growing more perfect, became organic in the species," p. 38. The italics are our own.
-The American Naturalist

Genre: History / World (fancy, right?)