530 P8TGH0L0GT. 



decision are, as sucli, agreeable, and relieve the tension of 

 doubt and hesitancy. Thus it comes that we will often 

 take any course whatever w^hich happens to be most vividly 

 before our minds, at the moment when this impulse to 

 decisive action becomes extreme. 



Against this impulse we have the dread of the irrevocable, 

 which often engenders a type of character incapable of 

 prompt and vigorous resolve, except perhaps when sur- 

 prised into sudden activity. These two opjDosing motives 

 twine round whatever other motives may be present at the 

 moment when decision is imminent, and tend to precipitate 

 or retard it. The conflict of these motives so far as they 

 alone affect the matter of decision is a conflict as to ivhen it 

 shall occur. One says * now,' the other says ' not yet.' 



Another constant component of the web of motivation is 

 the impulse to persist in a decision once made. There is 

 no more remarkable difference in human character than 

 that between resolute and irresolute natures. Neither the 

 physiological nor the psychical grounds of this difference 

 have yet been analyzed. Its symptom is that whereas in 

 the irresolute all decisions are provisional and liable to be 

 reversed, in the resolute they are settled once for all and 

 not disturbed again. Now into every one's deliberations 

 the representation of one alternative will often enter with 

 such sudden force as to carry the imagination with itself 

 exclusively, and to produce an apparentl}^ settled decision 

 in its own favor. These premature and spurious decisions 

 are of course known to everyone. They often seem ridicu- 

 lous in the light of the considerations that succeed them. 

 But it cannot be denied that in the resolute type of char- 

 acter the accident that one of them has once been made 

 does afterwards enter as a motive additional to the more 

 genuine reasons why it should not be revoked, or if pro- 

 visionally revoked, why it should be made again. How 

 many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a 

 moment of heedlessness, we might never have entered upon, 

 simply because we hate to ' change our mind.' 



