534 parcHOLOGY. 



Tn the JiftJi and final type of decision, the feeling that 

 the OA'idence is all in, and that reason has balanced the 

 books, may be either present or absent. But in either case 

 we feel, in deciding, as if Ave ourselves by our own wilful 

 act inclined the beam ; in the former case by adding our 

 living effort to the weight of the logical reason which, 

 taken alone, seems powerless to make the act discharge ; 

 in the latter by a kind of creative contribution of something 

 instead of a reason which does a reason's work. The slow 

 dead heave of the will that is felt in these instances makes, 

 of them a class altogether different subjectively from all 

 the three preceding classes. What the heave of the will 

 betokens metaphysically, what the effort might lead us to 

 infer about a will-power distinct from motives, are not 

 matters that concern us yet. Subjectively and phenome- 

 nally, \\ie,feding of effort, absent from the former decisions, 

 accompanies these. Whether it be the dreary resignation 

 for the sake of austere and naked duty of all sorts of rich 

 mundane delights, or whether it be the heavy resolve that 

 of two mutually exclusive trains of future fact, both sweet 

 and good, and with no strictly objective or imperative 

 principle of choice between them, one shall forevermore 

 become impossible, while the other shall become reality, 

 it is a desolate and acrid sort of act, an excursion into a lone- 

 some moral wilderness. If examined closel}^, its chief differ- 

 ence from the three former cases appears to be that in those 

 cases the mind at the moment of deciding on the trium- 

 phant alternative dropped the other one wholly or nearly 

 out of sight, whereas here both alternatives are steadily 

 held in view, and in the very act of murdering the van- 

 quished possibility the chooser realizes how much in that 

 instant he is making himself lose. It is deliberately 

 driving a thorn into one's flesh ; and the sense of in- 

 ward effort with which the act is accompanied is an ele- 

 ment which sets the fourth type of decision in strong contrast 

 with the previous three varieties, and makes of it an alto- 

 gether peculiar sort of mental phenomenon. The immense 

 majority of human decisions are decisions without effort. In 

 comparatively few of them, in most people, does effort accom- 

 pany the final act. We are, I think, misled into supposing that 



