Spencer, H. (1910). The will. In H. Spencer, The principles of psychology (pp. 495-504). New York, NY, US: D Appleton & Company.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/11003-036
All who have followed the argument thus far, will see that the development of what we call Will, is but another aspect of the general process whose other aspects have been delineated in the last three chapters. Memory, Reason, and Feeling, simultaneously arise as the automatic actions become complex, infrequent, and hesitating; and Will, arising at the same time, is necessitated by the same conditions. As the advance from the simple and indissolubly-coherent psychical changes, to the psychical changes that are involved and dissolubly coherent, is in itself the commencement of Memory, Reason, and Feeling; so, too, is it in itself the commencement of Will. Since all modes of consciousness can be nothing else than incidents of the correspondence between the organism and its environment; they must all be different sides of, or different phases of, the co-ordinated groups of changes whereby internal relations are adjusted to external relations. When the automatic actions become so involved, so varied in kind, and severally so infrequent, as no longer to be performed with unhesitating precision--when, after the reception of one of the more complex impressions, the appropriate motor changes become nascent, but are prevented from passing into immediate action by the antagonism of certain other nascent motor changes appropriate to some nearly allied impression; there is constituted a state of consciousness which, when it finally issues in action, displays what we term volition. The cessation of automatic action and the dawn of volition are one and the same thing. That every one is at liberty to do what he desires to do (supposing there are no external hindrances), all admit; though people of confused ideas commonly suppose this to be the thing denied. But that every one is at liberty to desire or not to desire, which is the real proposition involved in the dogma of free will, is negated as much by the analysis of consciousness as by the contents of the preceding chapters. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)