WILL. 559 



ing ' is a title wJiich covers not only the pleasant and tlie 

 painful, but also the morbidly fascinating, the tediously 

 haunting, and even the simply habitual, inasmuch as the 

 attention usually travels on habitual lines, and what-we-at- 

 tend-to and what-iuterests-us are synonj^mous terms. It 

 seems as if we ought to look for the secret of an idea's im- 

 pulsiveness, not in any peculiar relations which it may have 

 with paths of motor discharge, — for all ideas have relations 

 with some such paths, — but rather in a preliminary phe- 

 nomenon, the urgency, namely, ivitJi lohicli it is able to compel 

 attention and dominate in consciousness. Let it once so dom- 

 inate, let no other ideas succeed in displacing it, and what- 

 ever motor effects belong to it by nature will inevitably 

 occur — its impulsion, in short, will be given to boot, and will 

 manifest itself as a matter of course. This is what we have 

 seen in instinct, in emotion, in common ideo-motor action, 

 in hypnotic suggestion, in morbid impulsion, and in voluntas 

 invita, — the impelling idea is simply the one which possesses 

 the attention. It is the same where pleasure and pain are 

 the motor spurs — they drive other thoughts from con- 

 sciousness at the same time that they instigate their own 

 characteristic 'volitional' effects. And this is also what 

 happens at the moment of the Jiat, in all the five types of 

 'decision' which we have described. In short, one does not 

 see any case in which the steadfast occupancy of conscious- 

 ness does not appear to be the prime condition of impulsive 

 power. It is still more obviously the prime condition of 

 inhibitive power. What checks our impulses is the mere 

 thinking of reasons to the contrary — it is their bare presence 

 to the mind which gives the veto, and makes acts, otherwise 

 seductive, impossible to perform. If we could only forget 

 our scruples, our doubts, our fears, what exultant energy 

 we should for a while display- ! 



WILL IS A RELATION BETWEEN THE MIND AND ITS 

 ' IDEAS.' 



In closing in, therefore, after all these preliminaries, 

 upon the more intimate nature of the volitional process, we 

 find ourselves driven more and more exclusively to con- 

 sider the conditions which make ideas prevail in the mind. 



