Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/209

 VOLUNTARY ACTION IQI

system. In either case the significant thing is that it is controlled. But how ?

Man has the unique power of retaining his past experi ences in the form of mental images and of using them rep resentatively, of combining them in lengthy series of con cepts and judgments, in the light of which he deals with new situations as they arise. This is rationality. When stimuli of variant and often contradictory tendencies come into his experience and compete with one another, these ideas in which his past experience is stored up are revivified and under their guidance he resolves the conflict he chooses. This choice follows upon suspense (the arrest of the motor response), however brief, and deliberation (the weighing against one another of the relevant considerations arising from past experience) ; and it precedes the liberation of the impulse along a certain motor path. It is the end of the deliberating process, which is intellectual, and the beginning of the acting process, which is motor the point at which the one process passes into the other. Some impulses are inhibited and others are given the right of way; or some compromise is effected and the antagonistic impulses are unitedly turned in a direction different from that in which either was tending. The action is directed, controlled by the mental life as organized in individual experience, i. e., by the personality; and exactly herein lies the unique, char acteristic quality of voluntary action. A reflex action is not voluntary. I do not will to withdraw my hand when it comes in contact with a coal of fire, though I may will not to withdraw it. A purely instinctive action is not volun tary : a man does not ivill to flee from a lion which is charg ing upon him, nor are the successive co-ordinations of his muscles in the process of flight acts of will. Voluntary action is that in which the reflexive and instinctive activities are in some measure brought under the deliberate control of intelligence.

The relation of will to a series of reflexive or instinctive actions may be simply that of initiation. We may volun-

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