As a result the tendency was to limit the concept will to external volitional acts, and thus not only to neglect entirely the whole sphere so important for the higher development of will, namely, internal volitional acts, but also to pay very little attention to the components of the volition that are antecedent to the external acts, [p. 195] or at most only to the more striking ideational components of the motive. It followed that the close genetic interconnection between impulsive and voluntary acts was not observed, and that,the former were regarded as not belonging to will, but as closely related to reflexes. Will was thus limited to the voluntary and selective actions. Furthermore, the one-sided consideration of the ideational components of the motives led to a complete oversight of the development of volitional acts from emotions, and the singular idea found acceptance that volitional acts are not the products of antecedent motives and of psychical conditions which act upon these motives and bring one of them into the ascendency, but that volition is a process apart from the motives and independent of them, a product of a metaphysical volitional faculty. This faculty was, on the ground of the limitation of the concept volition to voluntary acts, even defined as the choosing faculty of the mind, or as its faculty for preferring one from among the different motives that influence it.
Thus, instead of deriving volition from the antecedent psychical conditions, the final result alone, the volitional act, was used to build up a general concept which was called will and this class-concept was treated in accordance with the faculty-theory as a first cause from which all concrete volitional acts arise. It was only a modification of this abstract theory when Schopenhauer and, following him, many modern psychologists and philosophers declared that volition in itself is an "unconscious" occurrence which comes to consciousness only in its result, the volitional act. In this case, obviously, the inadequate observation of the volitional process preceding the act, has led to the assertion that no such process exists. Here, again, the whole variety of concrete volitional processes is supplanted by the concept of a single unconscious will, and the result for psychology is the same as before: in place of a comprehension of concrete psychical processes and their combination, an abstract concept is set up and then erroneously looked upon as a general cause.
Modern psychology and even experimental psychology is still to a great extent under the ban of this deep-rooted abstract doctrine of will. In denying from the first the possibility of explaining an act from the concrete psychical causality of the antecedent volitional process, it leaves as the only characteristic [p. 196] of an act of will the sum of the sensations that accompany the external act, and may immediately precede it as pale memo images in cases where the act has often been repeated. The physical excitations in the nervous system are regarded as the causes of the act.
Here, then, the question of the causality is taken out of psychology and given over to physiology instead of to metaphysics, as in the theory discussed before. In reality, however, it is here too lost in metaphysics in attempting to cross to physiology. For physiology must, as an empirical science, abandon the attempt to give a complete causal explanation of a complex volitional act from its antecedents, not only for the present, but for all time, because this leads to the problem of an infinite succession. The only possible basis for such a theory is, therefore, the principle of materialistic metaphysics, that the so-called material processes are all that make up the reality of things and that psychical processes must accordingly be explained from material processes. But it is an indispensable principle of psychology as an empirical science, that it shall investigate the facts of psychical processes as they are presented in immediate experience, and that it shall not examine their interconnections from points of view that are entirely foreign to them (§ 1 and p. 17, sq.). It is impossible to find out how a volition proceeds in any other way than by following it exactly as it is presented to us in immediate experience. Here, however, it is not presented as an abstract concept, but as a concrete single volition. Of this particular volition, too, we know nothing except what is immediately perceptible in the process. We can know nothing of an unconscious or, what amounts to the same thing for psychology, a material process which is not immediately perceived but merely assumed hypothetically on the basis of metaphysical presuppositions. Such metaphysical assumptions are obviously merely devices to cover up an incomplete or entirely wanting psychological observation. The psychologist who pays attention to only the termination of the whole volitional process, will very easily hit upon the thought that the immediate cause of volition is some unconscious immaterial or material agent.
11. The exact observation of volitional processes is, for the reasons given above, impossible in the case of volitional [p. 177] acts that come naturally in the course of life; the only way in which a thorough psychological investigation can be made, is, therefore, that of experimental observation.