FACTS AND FACTORS OF DEVELOPMENT 77 



stimulus are possible and where experience has 

 taught that one response is more satisfactory 

 than another, action may be limited to this 

 particular response, not by external compul- 

 sion but by the internal impulse of experience 

 and intelligence. This is what we know as 

 conscious choice or will. Whitman says: 



Choice runs on blindly at first and ceases to be 

 blind only in proportion as the animal learns through 

 nature's system of compulsory education. The tele- 

 ological alternatives are organically provided; one is 

 taken and fails to give satisfaction, another is tried 

 and gives contentment. This little freedom is the 

 dawning grace of a new dispensation, in which educa- 

 tion by experience comes in as an amelioration of the 

 law of elimination. . . . Intelligence implies varying 

 degrees of freedom of choice, but never complete 

 emancipation from automatism. 



Freedom of action does not mean action 

 without stimuli, but rather the introduction of 

 the results of experience and intelligence as 

 additional stimuli. The activities which in 

 lower animals are "cabined, cribbed, confined," 

 reach in man their fullest and freest expres- 

 sion; but the enormous difference between the 

 relatively fixed behavior of a protozoan or a 



