260 Animal Intelligence 
atives of a response to produce it may be tempted to com- 
plain at this point that what the laws of exercise and effect 
do is to reduce the strength of competing ideas, and leave the 
idea, say of getting up, free to exercise its direct potency. 
The complaint shows a weak sense for fact. The ordinary 
child is not a Hamlet, nor is he beguiled by the imagined 
delights of staying in bed, nor repelled by the image of get- 
ting up out of it. On the contrary, he may be entirely will- 
ing to think of getting up. It is the actual delights that 
hold him, the actual discomforts that check him, and the 
only way to be sure that he will get up is so to arrange mat- 
ters that it is more satisfactory to him to get up than not to 
when the situation, whatever it be, that is to suggest that 
response, makes its appearance. 
The experience of every schoolroom shows that it is not 
enough to get the idea of an act. The act must have gone 
with that idea or be now put with it. The bond must be 
created. Responses to the suggestions of language, whether 
addressed to us by others or by ourselves in inner speech, 
in a very large majority of cases owe their bonds to the laws 
of exercise and effect.( We learn to do what we are told, 
or what we tell ourselves, by doing something and rejecting 
or retaining what we do by virtue of its effects) So also in 
the case of a majority of responses to the suggestions of other 
than verbal imagery. 
The idea of a response, like the perception of a response 
by another, acts often as a guide to response ex post facto by 
deciding what shall be satisfying. Where superficial inspec- 
tion leaves the impression that the idea creates the act, a 
little care often shows it to have only selected from the acts 
produced by instinct and habit. For example, let the reader 
think of some act never performed hitherto, such as putting 
his left middle finger upon the upper right hand corner of 
