Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/31

 GENERAL CONTROLS OF CONDUCT 13

with or when there is, for some reason, a voluntary effort to change it. The same is true not only with reference to habits of action but with reference to habits of thought and feeling also. It holds as to the whole mass of habitual proc esses built up in the experience of the human personality and constituting the personal character.

In this connection we may note a distinction between the animal and the human organism which is interesting, if not of particular significance, for our specific purpose. It is a notable fact that the human infant is born with a nervous system only partially organized. In this respect it is broadly distinguished from the young of other species. They are born with a nervous system already organized so completely and fixedly that only slight modifications of it can be effected through experience. But the human child has a brain mass which to a large extent is without organ ization and waiting to be organized in personal experience; and, as we have seen, the organization with which it be gins its career is less fixed and definite than is the case with animals of lower orders. Now, this looser instinctive or ganization means that the nervous co-ordinations, forming the so-called &quot; neural pathways &quot;as given at birth, are not so thoroughly established and that, therefore, the impulses do not pass through to motor expression so free from re sistance ; hence the instinctive reactions of the human species involve more consciousness than those of the sub human. But the difference in this respect appears most notably in the process of organizing the unorganized mass of nervous substance. This is, throughout, a process of habit-formation. But habits when formed have not the fixedness of the instincts. They are more easily inhibited, more readily modified, and in a life of varied experiences are undergoing continual change. We can see, then, that consciousness is a very much larger factor in the life of man than in the life of the lower animal. The human consciousness is clearer, more intense, more definite, larger in volume, if the expression may be allowed, than the animal

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