Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/420

 408 FKANCIS GALTON: whose issues were well known. I believe however that, if I had undertaken the inquiry in youth, when the number of my past experiences was only a fraction of what they now are, I should have found it much less easy to persuade myself of the frequency with which I act as an automaton. After these prefatory remarks, I come to the results. It will be best to begin with what I observed to be the usual conditions of irresolution. When I was distressed between opposite motives and the Will delayed to act, my irresolution seemed due to one or other of two or even three states, sufficiently different to be described separately, though having much in common. The first was that in which each of the alternative plans became less attractive the longer it was looked at, until it grew indifferent or even repellent ; then the attention lapsed to the other alternative ; and so it swung to and fro, incapable of wholly fixing itself upon either. The second was due to a fitfulness in the growth of the desire to change, accompanied by frequent retrogressions, and to an equally fitful waning of the wish not to change. The resolution was delayed until a considerable rise of the new desire corres- ponded with a sudden fall of the old one. Without caring to specify grandiose examples, I may say that in the daily act of wakening up and rising in the morning many instances of this occurred. The same process of rising afforded excellent illustrations of a third form of irresolution, which is, I think, of especial interest. The conditions I have in view are no particular call to get up, a comfortable bed, and a disinclination to leave it. My mind is then nimble and much more than half -awake, and I have a general sense of complete adaptation to circumstances, but a faint voice, as out of a different condition of things, preaches to me the merits of early rising. To this I may give intellectual assent, but, before it is possible for me to will to rise, the Ego that is subsist- ing in content must somehow be abolished and a transmigration must take place into a different Ego, that of wide-awake life. What I mean, is well expressed by the colloquial phrase of "turning over a new leaf". The mind is shifted into a new position of stable equilibrium, and it is just at the momentary heave of tumbling over into it, or, as it is sometimes expressed, at the moment of " making up the mind," that the wrench of will is felt. There is a somewhat similar sense of discomfort when a visual object has been interpreted in a particular fashion, and suddenly a different interpretation of it is forced upon us. The simplest example of this is found in the successive ways in which we apprehend a .... system of dots disposed in parallel lines and at equal distances apart. We may view them in .... lines that are either horizontal, sloping from left to right or from