532 PSYCHOLOGY. 



mas do not come to us with labels gummed upon their 

 backs. We may name them by many names. The wise 

 man is he who succeeds in finding the name which suits 

 the needs of the particular occasion best. A ' reasonable ' 

 character is one who has a store of stable and worthy ends, 

 and who does not decide about an action till he has calmly 

 ascertained whether it be ministerial or detrimental to any 

 one of these. 



In the next two types of decision, the final fiat occurs 

 before the evidence is all 'in.' It often hapjDens that no 

 paramount and authoritative reason for either course will 

 come. Either seems a case of a Good, and there is no 

 umpire as to which good should yield its place to the other. 

 We grow tired of long hesitation and inconclusiveness, and 

 the hour may come when we feel that even a bad decision is 

 better than no decision at all. Under these conditions it 

 will often hapjDen that some accidental circumstance, super- 

 vening at a particular movement upon our mental weariness, 

 will upset the balance in the direction of one of the alter- 

 natives, to which then we feel ourselves committed, al- 

 though an opposite accident at the same time might have 

 produced the opposite result. 



In the second type of case our feeling is to a certain 

 extent that of letting ourselves drift with a certain in- 

 different acquiescence in a direction accidentally deter- 

 mined from without, with the conviction that, after all, we 

 might as well stand by this course as by the other, and 

 that things are in any event sure to turn out sufficiently 

 right. 



In the third type the determination seems equally acci- 

 dental, but it comes from within, and not from without. 

 It often happens, when the absence of imperative princi- 

 ple is perplexing and suspense distracting, that we find our- 

 selves acting, as it were, automatically, and as if by a spon- 

 taneous discharge of our nerves, in the direction of one of 

 the horns of the dilemma. But so exciting is this sense of 

 motion after our intolerable pent-up state, that we eagerly 

 throw ourselves into it. ' Forward now ! ' we inwardly cry, 

 'though the heavens fall.' This reckless and exultant es- 



