Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/210

 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

tarily start a foreseen train of such actions and then it is fair to call the whole series voluntary. When a base-ball player runs a base there may be but one act of volition, a setting off a whole train of reflexive-instinctive muscular contractions, but we rightly call the whole complex act of running the base voluntary. Habitual actions may likewise be voluntary, in that they may represent original choices in the formation of the habit ; and after the habit has become fixed a train of habitual acts may be voluntarily initiated, &quot; touched off,&quot; as it were, by a single volition, as when a pianist begins to play a piece of familiar music. But always and everywhere, if the action is truly voluntary, it must be, either mediately or immediately, the result of choice and under the direction of intelligence, the organized indn vidual experience, the personality.

II. A second fundamental fact of life must be consid ered if we would properly appreciate the significance of the function of will. To Bergson chiefly we owe the keen realization of the forth-reaching, onward-moving character of life. Duration or time is its element, change is its process. It is essentially transitive and dynamic, the very antithesis of the static. At each instant it tends to pass, and is passing, from one state into another. This charac teristic becomes more pronounced as the level of life rises. It is more obvious in the animal than in the vegetable ; more manifest in man than in the beast. Increase the volume of life, and its &quot; urge,&quot; its forward tension, its projection (elan) seems to increase proportionately. We may question, in deed, whether it does not increase in geometrical rather than in arithmetical ratio. Perhaps its nearest analogue is the law of physical motion the momentum is the mass multi plied by the velocity. Life and its manifestations are not, of course, like material objects and movements, capable of mathematical formulation. But certainly with its on ward movement, its transition through time, it normally develops in volume, and, with its fuller development, its

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