ent attitude becomes a
habit with some individuals. Besides, there are the negative motives
of fear, shyness and laziness that tend to deter from the actual
execution of a plan. Hamlet's "conscience" that makes "cowards of us
all", so that "the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the
pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment . . .
lose the name of action" turns out, if we look a few lines further
back, to be the "dread of something" unknown, that "puzzles the will,
and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we
know not of". {540} Fear--fear of unforeseen consequences, fear of
committing ourselves, fear of ridicule--is one great inhibiter of
action, and inertia is another, since it is much less strenuous to sit
in the armchair and plan than to get out and put the plan into effect.
Besides this, some people who are good at planning come to take so
much pride and satisfaction in the thinking part of an enterprise that
they do not feel the need for action. Moreover, you can "plan" in a
large way, without bothering about details, but once you start to
execute your plan you encounter details and preliminaries which are
apt to rob the enterprise of its zest. Here is where persistence and
effort are needed.

_Abulia_--"no will"--is an abnormal degree of lack of zest for action.
Along with it go timidity and lack of social force, proneness to
rumination and daydreaming, and often a feeling of being compelled to
perform useless acts, such as doing everything three times or
continual washing of the hands. Abulia is not just a comfortable
laziness, but is attended by a sense of humiliation and inferiority.
It shows itself in excessive hesitation and vacillation and in failure
to accomplish anything of consequence. Sometimes the subject expends
much effort, but fails to direct the effort towards the execution of
his purposes. Some authorities have ascribed abulia to inertia or "low
mental tension", some to an overdose of fear and caution, some to the
paralyzing effect of suppressed desires still living in the
"unconscious". Mild degrees of it, such as are not uncommon, seem
sometimes to be due to the hiatus that is bound to exist between the
end one has in view and the means one must take to start towards that
end. One has zest for reaching the goal, but not for the
preliminaries.

An author, whose case was studied because he was accomplishing so
little, was found to follow