LECTURE   XV

§ I. Relation of Feeling to Will; Impulse and Desire. § II.
Development of Will. § III. Simple and Complex Voluntary
Acts.   § IV.  Psychological Elements in Voluntary Action.

§  I

IN the previous discussion we took as our starting-point the
fact that the affective side of consciousness at any moment
seems to exhibit a unitary interconnection similar to that
presented by its ideational contents. But further investigation
convinced us that the affective unity of consciousness differs in
important respects from its ideational unity. The latter appears
to be external, in the sense that the particular ideas are united
into a whole, more especially by the spatial relations in which
they stand to each other, without the constituents of this whole
being necessarily brought into any internal relation. In feeling
it is quite different. It is true that several qualitatively different
feelings may exist side by side, but they always give rise also to
a total feeling which endows the entire group of separate feelings
with an internal coherence.

We shall best understand this internal unity of feeling if we
look somewhat more closely at the connection of feeling with
will,—a subject to which we referred in a general way at the
beginning of the last lecture. This connection may be regarded
from two points of view. In the first place, feeling is only
thinkable as a mental state of a being endowed with will ;
pleasurable and unpleasurable feelings tend to direct the course
of the will. Whether or not they pass over into actual volition
is determined by internal and external conditions. But without
the capacity to will the alternatives could not possibly exist.
Secondly, will is an internal process, distinguished  from other