AUTOMATIC ACTION 253 



making many mistakes. In the end, though she gives only 

 passing attention to her knitting, she works at speed and 

 rarely makes mistakes. Her actions have become automatic. 

 In a similar way we learn to walk, to write, to cycle, to play 

 the piano, and so forth. It is a main business of our lives to 

 make as many actions automatic as possible. Only thus are 

 we enabled to move with comfort and success in our world, 

 doing automatically many useful things at the same time 

 that our thoughts are busied mainly with actions that we are 

 unable to perform in this easy way. Now the question we 

 have to decide, and which, up to now, we have left in abeyance, 

 is whether an action ceases to be voluntary when it becomes 

 automatic. 



414. It should be noted (1) that every automatic action 

 was once voluntary and has passed only by slow gradations 

 from one category to another; (2) that every automatic 

 action becomes voluntary whenever we concentrate our 

 thoughts on it ; and (3) that every voluntary action has in 

 grown people an automatic element, for grown people co-or- 

 dinate their muscles with comparative ease, swiftness, and 

 lack of thought even when doing unusual actions ; whereas 

 the infant does so only after long practice. If, then, we 

 decide that automatic actions are non-volitional, we must 

 conclude that only those actions are volitional on the doing 

 of which we concentrate our thoughts ; whereas if an action 

 is so easy, because habitual, that when doing it we are able 

 to let our thoughts wander, then immediately it becomes 

 involuntary. So that if a woman decides to knit, and then 

 while knitting lets her thoughts wander, the beginning of 

 her action is voluntary, but the rest of it involuntary. 



415. Dr. Carpenter writes "In this familiar experience 

 [walking] we can clearly trace three distinct modes of action 

 the Automatic, the Voluntary, and the Volitional. While 

 we are all unconscious of the movements our legs are execut- 

 ing for us those movements are purely automatic. When our 

 attention is not so completely engrossed elsewhere, but that 

 we know where we are, and what we are doing, the move- 

 ments of locomotion are not only permitted by the will, but 

 may be guided by it into some unusual direction ; such 

 movements are voluntary. But when the sense of fatigue 

 attending each movement makes it necessary that a distinct 

 effort of Will shall be exerted for its repetition, the act comes 

 to be volitional" ..." There may still be metaphysicians 

 who maintain that actions which were originally prompted 

 by the Will with a distinct intention, and which are still 



