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.In many of our own voluntaryactions the end is anticipated or foreseen in the most general manneronly; to take a trivial but instructive instance: you cough in order toclear your throat; or, experiencing a slight irritation in your throat, youput out your hand, take up a glass of water, and drink, in order to allayit.How very sketchy and ill-defined may be your thought of the end ofyour action! And even in the execution of our most carefully thought-out, our most purposeful, actions, our anticipatory thought or represen-tation of the end to be achieved falls far short of its actual fulness ofconcrete detail.The anticipation of the end of action is, then, alwaysmore or less incomplete; its adequacy is a matter of degree.Thereforewe ought not to assume that a clear and full anticipation or idea of theend is an essential condition of purposive action; and we have no war-rant for setting up the instances in which anticipation is least incompleteas alone conforming to the purposive type, and for setting apart all in-stances in which anticipation is less full and definite as of a radicallydifferent nature.It is important also to note that the representation or idea of the endis not truly the cause or determining condition of the purposive activity.The merely cognitive process of representing or conceiving the end orthe course of action does not of itself suffice to evoke the action; we canimagine many possible actions or ends of actions, without carrying themout or feeling any inclination to pursue them; in fact it often happensthat the more clearly we envisage the end and course of a possible ac-tion, the more strongly averse to it do we become.The truth is that theanticipatory representation of the end of action merely serves to guidethe course of action in detail; the essential condition of action is that aconative tendency, a latent disposition to action, shall be evoked.Wherethe anticipatory representation of the end is vague and sketchy and gen-eral, there the action will be general, vague, imperfectly directed in de-tail; where it is more detailed and full, there action is more specialized,more nicely adjusted to the achievement of its end.From our own experience we are familiar with actions in whichAn Introduction to Social Psychology/243anticipation of the end varies from that of the most clear and detailednature through all degrees of incompleteness down to the most vagueand shadowy, a mere anticipation of change of some undefined kind.Weare therefore able to form some notion of the inner or subjective side ofthe action of animals, even of those lowest in the scale of organization.Putting aside a limited number of animal actions which owe their defi-niteness and precision to guidance at every point by new impressionsfalling from moment to moment upon the sense-organs (as in the moststriking instances of purely instinctive action), we see that, as we godown the scale of life, actions become less precisely guided in detail,and present more and more the character of random or but vaguelydirected efforts; in this corresponding to what we may legitimately sup-pose to be the increasing vagueness of the anticipatory representationsby which they are guided.The theoretical lower limit of this series wouldbe what has been well called (by Dr.Stout) anoetic sentience; a merefeeling or sentience involving no objective reference and giving rise onlyto movement or effort that is completely undirected.This lower limit isapproached in our own experience when we stir uneasily or writhe orthrow ourselves wildly about, under the stimulus of some vaguely local-ized internal pain.But we do not ourselves experience the limiting case,and it is questionable whether we can properly suppose it to be realizedin the simplest instances of animal behaviour; it seems probable that theactions of even the lowliest animals imply a vague awareness of some-thing, together with some vague forward reference, some vague antici-pation of a change in this something.Knowing, then, is always for the sake of action; the function ofcognition is to initiate action and to guide it in detail.But the activityimplies the evoking, the coming into play, of a latent tendency to action,a conative disposition; every such tendency or conative disposition iseither of a very general or of a more specialized or specific character;and each such conative tendency) when awakened or brought into play,maintains itself until its proper or specific end is attained, and sustainsalso the course of bodily and mental activity required for the attainmentof that end.When, then, any creature strives towards an end or goal, itis because it possesses as an ultimate feature of its constitution what wecan only call a disposition or latent tendency to strive towards that end,a conative disposition which is actualized or brought into operation bythe perception (or other mode of cognition) of some object.Each organ-ism is endowed, according to its species, with a certain number and244/William McDougallvariety of such conative dispositions as a part of its hereditary equip-ment for the battle of life; and in the course of its life these may undergocertain modifications and differentiations.To attempt to give any further account of the nature of these con-ative dispositions would be to enter upon a province of metaphysicalspeculation, and is a task not demanded of psychology [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]