ers besides, and cooerdinating them all
into the complex and decidedly high-grade sentiment of love.

Obstruction and Effort

The term "will" is used to designate the response to external
obstruction as well as the response to internal conflict. In fact,
nothing is so characteristically "will" as the overcoming of
resistance that checks progress towards a desired result. As
"decision" is the response to internal conflict of tendencies, so
"effort" is the response to external {536} resistance encountered in
executing a desire that has been adopted. The obstruction may be
purely physical, as the underbrush that impedes your progress through
the woods; or it may be another person's will running counter to
yours; or it may be of the nature of distraction of attention from the
end in view.

The resistance may also be internal, and consist in your own lack of
skill in executing your intentions, or in the disturbing effect of
some desire which, though rejected, has not gone to sleep but still
pulls you another way than the way you have decided to go.

In all these cases, the individual is moving towards a certain goal,
but encounters obstruction; and his response is effort, or increased
energy put into his movement towards the goal. So long as the tendency
towards a goal finds smooth going, there is not the same determination
that appears as soon as an obstruction is encountered. The "will", in
common usage, will not brook resistance--the "indomitable will".

Now effort and determination, in our chapter on the native impulses,
were put under the head of the assertive or masterful tendency; and it
does seem that "will", in this sense, is almost the same thing as the
instinct of self-assertion. Certainly, in the case of adults, an
obstruction puts the individual "on his mettle", and superimposes the
mastery motive upon whatever motive it may have been that originally
prompted the action.

The mastery motive came clearly to light in an experiment designed to
investigate "will action". The subject of the experiment was first
given a long course of training in responding to certain stimulus
words by other certain words that were constantly paired with them;
and when his habits of response were thus well fixed, his task was
changed so that now he must respond to any word or syllable by any
{537} other that _rhymed_ with it. A series of stimuli now began with
words for which no specific response habit had been formed, and to