to a definite
and irretrievable course of action. Unless we try to drive our way
through by sheer brute force, we must modify our organic resources to
adapt them to the specific features of the situation in which we find
ourselves. The conscious deliberating and desiring which precede overt
action are, then, the methodic personal readjustment implied in activity
in uncertain situations. This role of mind in continuous activity is not
always maintained, however. Desires for something different, aversion to
the given state of things caused by the blocking of successful activity,
stimulates the imagination. The picture of a different state of things
does not always function to aid ingenious observation and recollection
to find a way out and on. Except where there is a disciplined
disposition, the tendency is for the imagination to run loose. Instead
of its objects being checked up by conditions with reference to their
practicability in execution, they are allowed to develop because of
the immediate emotional satisfaction which they yield. When we find the
successful display of our energies checked by uncongenial surroundings,
natural and social, the easiest way out is to build castles in the air
and let them be a substitute for an actual achievement which involves
the pains of thought. So in overt action we acquiesce, and build up
an imaginary world in, mind. This break between thought and conduct is
reflected in those theories which make a sharp separation between mind
as inner and conduct and consequences as merely outer.

For the split may be more than an incident of a particular individual's
experience. The social situation may be such as to throw the class
given to articulate reflection back into their own thoughts and desires
without providing the means by which these ideas and aspirations can
be used to reorganize the environment. Under such conditions, men
take revenge, as it were, upon the alien and hostile environment by
cultivating contempt for it, by giving it a bad name. They seek refuge
and consolation within their own states of mind, their own imaginings
and wishes, which they compliment by calling both more real and more
ideal than the despised outer world. Such periods have recurred in
history. In the early centuries of the Christian era, the influential
moral systems of Stoicism, of monastic and popular Christianity and
other religious movements of the day, took shape under the influence of
such conditio