Still, we may have a bodily movement as the secondary [p. 192] result of an internal volitional act, when the resolution refers to an external act to be executed at some later time. In such a case the act itself always results from a special external volition whose decisive motives come from the preceding internal volition, but which we must consider as a new process distinct from the earlier. Thus, for example, the formation. of a resolution to execute an act in the future under certain expected conditions, is an internal volition, while the later, performance of the act is an external action different from the first, but requiring it as a necessary antecedent.
It is evident that where an external volitional act arises from a decision after a conflict among the motives, we have a transition in which it is impossible to distinguish clearly between the two kinds of volition, namely that consisting in a single unitary process and that made up of two such processes, an internal and an external. In such a transitional form, if the decision is at all separated in time from the act itself, it may be regarded as an internal volitional act preparatory to the execution.
10. These two changes connected with the development of will, namely, the moderation of emotions and the rendering independent of internal volitions, are changes of aggressive order. In contrast with these there is a third process or one of retrogradation. When complex volitions with the same motive are often repeated, the conflict between the motives grows less intense; the opposing motives that were, overcome in earlier cases grow weaker and finally disappears entirely. The complex act has then passed into a simple, or impulsive act. This retrogradation of complex volitional, processes into impulsive processes shows clearly the utter inappropriateness of the limitation of the concept "impulsive" to acts of will arising from sense-feelings. As a result of the gradual elimination of opposing motives, there are, [p.
193] intellectual, moral, and aesthetic, as well as simple sensuous, impulsive acts.
This retrogradation is but one step in a process that unites all the external acts of a living being, both the volitional acts and the automatic reflex movements. When the habituating practice of certain acts is carried further, the determining motives finally become, even in impulsive acts, weaker and more transient. The external stimulus originally aroused a strongly affective idea which operated as a motive, but now it causes the discharge of the act before it can be apprehended as an idea. In this way the impulsive movement finally becomes an automatic movement. The more often this automatic movement is repeated, the easier it, in turn, becomes, even when the stimulus is not sensed, as, for example, in deep sleep or during complete diversion of the attention. The movement now appears as a pure physiological reflex, and the volitional process has become a simple reflex process.
This gradual reduction of volitional to mechanical processes, which depends essentially on the elimination of all the elements between the physical beginning and end of the act, may take place either in the case of movements that were originally impulsive or in that of movements which have secondarily become such through the retrogradation of voluntary acts.
It is not improbable that all the reflex movements of both animals and men originate in this way. As evidence for this we have, besides the reduction of volitional acts to pure mechanical processes through practice, as described above, also the appropriate character of reflexes, which point to the presence at some time of a purposive idea as motive. Furthermore, the circumstance that the movements of the lowest animals are all evidently simple volitional acts, not reflexes, tells for the same view, so that here [p. 194] too there is no justification for the assumption frequently made that acts of will have been developed from reflex movements. Finally, we can most easily explain from this point of view the facts mentioned in § 13 (p. 172), that expressive movements may belong to any one of the forms possible in the scale of external acts. Obviously the simplest movements are impulsive acts, while many complicated pantomimetic movements probably came originally from voluntary acts which passed first into impulsive and then into reflex movements. Observed phenomena make it necessary to assume that the retrogradations that begin in the individual life are gradually carried further through the transmission of acquired dispositions, so that certain acts which were originally voluntary may appear ill later descendants from the first as impulsive or reflex movements (§ 19 and § 20).
10a. For reasons similar to those given in the case of emotions, the observation of volitional processes that come into experience by chance, is an inadequate and easily misleading method for establishing the actual facts in the case. Wherever internal or external volitional acts are performed in meeting either the theoretical or practical demands of life, our interest is too much taken up in the action itself to allow us at the same time to observe with exactness the psychical processes that are going on. In the theories of volition given by older psychologists -- theories that very often cast their shadows in the science of to-day -- we have a clear reflection of the undeveloped state of the methods of psychological observation.
External acts of will are the only ones in the whole sphere of volitional processes that force themselves emphatically on the attention of the observer.