第87章 CONSCIOUSNESS AND ATTENTION(8)

On the other hand, there are those contents of experience which do not belong to this spacial order, though they are continually brought into relation with it through their quality and intensity. These latter contents, as we saw in § 12-14, are intimately interconnected. Feelings are parts of emotions and emotions are to be considered as components of volitional processes. The process, may end before it is fully completed, as often when a feeling gives rise to no noticeable emotion, or when an emotion fades out without really causing the volitional act for which prepared the way. All these affective processes may, accordingly, be subsumed under the general concept volitional process. This is the complete process of which the two others are merely components of simpler or more complex character. From this point of view we can easily understand how it is that even simple feelings contain, in the extremes be they vary, a volitional direction; and express, in the same way the amount of volitional energy present at a given moment; and finally, correspond to certain particular phases of the volitional process itself. The direction of volition is obviously indicated by the pleasurable or unpleasurable directions of [p. 221] feelings, which correspond directly to some sort of effort to reach something or to avoid it. The energy of volition finds its expression in the arousing and subduing directions of feelings, while the opposite phases of a volitional process are related to the directions of strain and relaxation.

11. Thus, volition proves to be the fundamental fact from which all those processes arise which are made up of feelings. Then, too, in the process of apperception, which is found through psychological analysis to have all the characteristics of a volitional act, we have a direct relation between this fundamental fact and the ideational contents of experience which arise from the spacial arrangement of sensations. Now, volitional processes are apprehended as unitary processes and as being uniform in character in the midst of all the variations in their components. As a result there arises an immediate feeling of this unitary interconnection, which is most intimately connected with the feeling of activity that accompanies all volition, and then is carried over to all conscious contents because of their relation to will, as mentioned above. This feeling of the interconnection of all single psychical experiences is called the "ego". It is a feeling, not an idea as it is often called. Like all feelings, however, it is connected with certain sensations and ideas. The ideational components most closely related to the ego are the common sensations and the idea of one's own body.

That part of the affective and ideational contents which separates off from the totality of consciousness and fuses closely with the feeling of the ego, is called self-consciousness. It is no more a reality, apart from the processes of which it is made up, than is consciousness in general, but merely Points out the interconnection of these processes, which furthermore, especially in their ideational components, can never be sharply distinguished from the rest of consciousness. This [p. 222] shows itself most of all in the fact that the idea of one's own body sometimes fuses with the feeling of the ego, sometimes is distinct from it as the idea of an object, and that in general self-consciousness in its development always tends to reduce itself to its affective basis.