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UTAH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 209 
the title of this paper, the conditions of voluntary control. 
We seem to be assuming, as the popular mind would say, 
that the will is not free, that it is subservient to something, 
viz., these very conditions we are about to study. This 
same popular mind would say that the will is a dynamic, 
causal agent which is not at all the result of conditions. 
To use a dynamic figure, he would probably say that the will 
is the charge of explosive which blows these socalled con- 
ditions to the four winds. From this conception, which was 
at one time the view of psychologists and still the view 
of the popular writers such as Channing, Larsen and others, 
psychologists had to be freed before profitable experimen- 
tation could proceed. The writer has no desire to seek 
fame for himself, rather charity, when he says that this 
study is one of the first attempts to put the will problem 
on what I want to call a profitable experimental basis. In 
fact the experimental part of the thesis herein contained, so 
far as it is a study of control, is in every way original with 
the writer. 
The only studies which have thrown any light at all 
on the physiological conditions underlying voluntary control 
are those from the abnormal field. These studies have 
been made upon abnormal patients in hospitals and asylums. 
In many of these abnormal cases, the control, which has 
been built up by long practice, as in the case of handwriting, 
has been lost piecemeal through progressive breakdown 
of the nervous system in disease. The remnants of the 
nervous system left intact and the resulting loss in control 
has thrown a flood of light on the physiological mechanism 
of control. These studies have not, however, left us with 
any means of aiding or determining the conditions of con- 
trol in the normal subject, and it is just these which the 
industrial psychologist wants to be able to do. 
With just these ideas in mind, the writer was stimu- 
lated to attempt some actual experiments with normal 
subjects on the conditions of control. I cannot introduce 
you to my point of view better than by narrating some of 
the stages of development through which I went in building 
up the experiment. William James years ago made a 
