UNIVERSITY REFORMS 67 



and take a walk in the country. The other keeps me at my desk and 

 busy with my writing. Each impulse is the resultant of a complex of 

 sensations, ideas, habits so involved and intricate that in the present 

 state of our knowledge only a superficial analysis is possible ; and what 

 I shall will to do in this particular case is largely the resultant of a 

 series of acts that have gone before. Abnormal mental states empha- 

 size certain components in the mental chain, so that we can get an 

 inkling of the mechanism involved in the expression of volitional choice 

 between two motives. If it is blue Monday and I am mentally de- 

 pressed, the tendency to sit still at my desk and mope is stronger than 

 either of the other two motives, and if the depression deepens, every 

 effort becomes difficult, the sense of the freedom of the will is reduced 

 to the minimum, and it may be that the normal desire for food van- 

 ishes. Finally in an extreme case physicians and nurses are brought 

 in to force the feeding and give the general treatment necessary to 

 restore my lost energies and key me up to the pitch when simple de- 

 cisions are no longer associated vrith an abnormal sense of effort. 



Another condition may occur, and instead of being depressed, I am 

 exhilarated. The sense of effort is diminished, action becomes easy and 

 the sense of fatigue is absent. Impulses to action, to walk, talk, write, 

 gesticulate, are constant. During the period of depression, I was on the 

 earth, now I am walking on the clouds. Ideation is rapid. I dash off 

 sentence aft^r sentence, or I walk miles with but slight sense of fatigue. 

 The obstacles to effort created during my period of depression vanish 

 into thin air. A whole host of sensations of a pleasant nature stream 

 into my consciousness and the passage from the depths of Lethe to the 

 heights of Olympus is completed. If the depression or exhilaration sur- 

 passes certain bounds established for convenience sake by legal authori- 

 ties, the analysis of motives becomes easier than in the instances where 

 the rises and falls in the emotional life are less marked. 



There is a very promising field for prophylaxis in preventing the 

 occurrence of abnormalities in the volitional acts. One or two examples 

 will suffice to indicate our meaning and suggest the corrections. Many 

 of the beneficial results of athletic sports are almost entirely lost by 

 the encouragement given to the hysterical manifestations of emotional- 

 ism, which so frequently affect the spectators even more than the par- 

 ticipants. 



The lack of practical interest in a preventive morality is shown by 

 the university authorities who permit the members of a football team 

 to be fed on an almost exclusive meat diet, subjected to the nervous 

 strain of exciting games, and then when the balance of the nervous 

 system has been suddenly upset, expect them to successfully resist the 

 cravings created by the general system of dieting and training to which 

 they have been subjected. When the Boman Catholic church wishes 



