THE LIMITS OF HUMAN AUTOMATISM. 299 



feeling, alter the relative potency of different motives or sets of 

 motives, by detcrminately directing his attention to those wliich 

 would draw him in one direction, and by partially or completely 

 excluding those of an opposite tendency from his mental view. 



If it be urged by the Automatist that this fixation of the Ego's 

 attention on one set of motives to the exclusion of the other, is 

 really due to the superior strength of the motive (supplied by his 

 previously formed character) which leads him to desire so to fix it, 

 I reply that no experience of which I am conscious is more real 

 to me, than that if I did not make an effort to keep my attention 

 fixed, the desire alone would fail to do it. I am further conscious 

 that a great deal more is " taken out of me " (to use an expressive 

 colloquialism) by the prolongation of such a struggle, than by a 

 far larger measure of undistracted mental action. And I ask, 

 "Why, on the automatist theory, should this be?" — To myself 

 it seems clear that it is in the control he thus acquires over the 

 automatism of his nature, that Man's //r^^i?/;/ of choice essentially 

 consists ; whilst, on the other hand, it is in virtue of his want of 

 power to gain a complete control, that \\\s freedom is limited. 



This view seems to me to find its strongest support in the 

 experience of those who have been most largely and most success- 

 fully engaged in the education of the young. For, as I have had 

 abundant opportunities of learning, they watch for the dawn of 

 this power of retiection and deliberation in the child, endeavour 

 to strengthen his feeble resolution by judicious encouragement, 

 lead him to reflect upon the consequences of his misdoing to 

 himself or to others, and give additional force to his sense of 

 duty by earnest appeals to it, so as to sustain him in a conflict to 

 which he is as yet unequal if left to himself; but at the same time 

 they make him feel that he must not always expect such help, and 

 that it rests with himself, by habitually fixing his attention upon 

 what his reason and his moral sense tell him he ought to do, to 

 be able to will to do it against his inclination. 



No experience is so remarkable in its bearing on this question, 

 as that of the philanthropic men and women who have taken the 

 largest and most efiicient share in the work of juvenile reforma- 

 tion. For they have to deal with a class of boys and girls, who 

 have grown up to a most unmanageable age, in habits of entire 



