EVOLUTION THE MASTER-KEY 



a cessation or inaction of inhibition on the part of 

 the highest centres. They cease to restrain, and 

 the result is action. On the other hand, inaction 

 (I do not mean inertia, but the power to sit still, 

 to hold tight when the horse runs away, to "bide 

 your time," to be a still man in a blatant land) 

 is the really active and truly volitional process, 

 since it depends on the active and positive power 

 of inhibition or control exerted by the higher 

 centres upon the lower. And this I know, that 

 inhibition is far older and far more essential to 

 successful nervous action than is conscious voli- 

 tion or realization of the self, as an academic 

 psychologist would say; for inhibition is known 

 as a nervous fact in the history of life many aeons 

 before the development of self - consciousness in 

 man. 



I am aware that this subject is by no means 

 easy, and it is not every reader who will have 

 sufficient power of inhibition to enable him to 

 arrest the natural reflex of going on to the next 

 chapter without bothering to see whether there 

 may not be something intelligible in this. But I 

 find much satisfaction in a theory which lays 

 emphasis on self-control in an age when the older 

 virtues are being decried as "bourgeois" and "un- 

 distinguished"; besides which I believe the theory 

 of the genesis of what we call will in the will-not-to, 

 at first subconscious, to be true and significant; 

 not that any father is a good judge of his own 

 baby. 



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