632 THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF INDIVIDUALITY 



the effect of our own thoughts and suggestions on our behavior and attitudes, 

 and especially the fact that the addition or lack of a thought may turn the 

 balance in our responses in one or the other direction, all these factors 

 constitute largely the substratum which, in its complexity, gives us the feeling 

 of freedom ; and it is just this apparently free and non-determined, or rather 

 self -determining, part of our actions and expressions which we feel as the 

 most characteristic feature of our individuality. 



The most conscious thoughts associating readily with other thought- 

 emotion complexes, and especially also with the "I" complex, the directing 

 thought-emotion processes in us are felt as the constants in our individuality, 

 which operate and connect the states of our changing organism and our 

 actions in successive periods and apparently make it one homogeneous con- 

 sistent whole representing our real self. It is this part of us which seems 

 to us to be independent of the outer world, in contrast with our bodily func- 

 tions and simpler nervous automatisms, which evidently depend upon the 

 interaction with the outer world and which do not therefore represent solely 

 ourselves. 



The central governing thought-emotion processes, affect in a direct manner 

 our own organism, and in particular our muscles, but secondarily they can 

 also affect and change our environment, of which, to some extent, we thus 

 become the master. In a measure however, we can, besides, control ourselves. 

 Our conscious thoughts can automatically, by their mere functioning, suppress 

 injurious emotional reactions and direct our responses in a rational way. 

 Thinking, as such, about our actions may thus function in an automatic way 

 as a moderator, and it is especially through such a mechanism that we feel 

 our will is free. 



But this mechanism needs further analysis. The conditioned reflexes active 

 in us are often associated with thoughts and pictures which we may describe 

 and analyze and thus reproduce. These thoughts and pictures may develop 

 in us also in a more complex roundabout way by means of chains of thoughts 

 which, however, usually have likewise been set in motion through outside 

 stimuli. They are of the same kind as those which are transmitted to us by 

 others, or by reading. Thoughts may thus come to us in various ways. How- 

 ever, if, as usual, the source of these thoughts is not clear to us, then they 

 appear to us to originate spontaneously in ourselves and to be the expression 

 of our free will, of our individuality. The pictures and thoughts, associated 

 with what we do and entering as a factor into our conditioned reflex 

 mechanisms, may intensify the reflex action automatically; on the other 

 hand, also, a process inhibiting these pictures and thoughts and at the 

 same time making the thoughts conscious may develop, and this latter process 

 may interfere not only with these pictures and thoughts, but also with the 

 primary conditioned reflexes which set these processes of thinking in motion. 

 In this manner rationally connected thoughts may interfere with our primary, 

 more simple reactions ; they may control and make rational our actions, and 

 they exert these effects by means of mechanisms which may not become 

 conscious to us. Complex sense impressions, their memories, as well as 



