Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/71

Rh and take a walk in the country. The other keeps me at my desk and busy with my writing. Each impulse is the resultant of a complex of sensations, ideas, habits so involved and intricate that in the present state of our knowledge only a superficial analysis is possible; and what I shall will to do in this particular case is largely the resultant of a series of acts that have gone before. Abnormal mental states emphasize certain components in the mental chain, so that we can get an inkling of the mechanism involved in the expression of volitional choice between two motives. If it is blue Monday and I am mentally depressed, the tendency to sit still at my desk and mope is stronger than either of the other two motives, and if the depression deepens, every effort becomes difficult, the sense of the freedom of the will is reduced to the minimum, and it may be that the normal desire for food vanishes. Finally in an extreme case physicians and nurses are brought in to force the feeding and give the general treatment necessary to restore my lost energies and key me up to the pitch when simple decisions are no longer associated with an abnormal sense of effort.

Another condition may occur, and instead of being depressed, I am exhilarated. The sense of effort is diminished, action becomes easy and the sense of fatigue is absent. Impulses to action, to walk, talk, write, gesticulate, are constant. During the period of depression, I was on the earth, now I am walking on the clouds. Ideation is rapid. I dash off sentence after sentence, or I walk miles with but slight sense of fatigue. The obstacles to effort created during my period of depression vanish into thin air. A whole host of sensations of a pleasant nature stream into my consciousness and the passage from the depths of Lethe to the heights of Olympus is completed. If the depression or exhilaration surpasses certain bounds established for convenience sake by legal authorities, the analysis of motives becomes easier than in the instances where the rises and falls in the emotional life are less marked.

There is a very promising field for prophylaxis in preventing the occurrence of abnormalities in the volitional acts. One or two examples will suffice to indicate our meaning and suggest the corrections. Many of the beneficial results of athletic sports are almost entirely lost by the encouragement given to the hysterical manifestations of emotionalism, which so frequently affect the spectators even more than the participants.

The lack of practical interest in a preventive morality is shown by the university authorities who permit the members of a football team to be fed on an almost exclusive meat diet, subjected to the nervous strain of exciting games, and then when the balance of the nervous system has been suddenly upset, expect them to successfully resist the cravings created by the general system of dieting and training to which they have been subjected. When the Roman Catholic church wishes