ome clear and lively enough, this conception has a strong
tendency to impose itself upon belief; and psychologists trained on
biological lines usually adopt it as the last word of science on the
subject. No one can have an adequate notion of modern psychological
theory unless he has at some time apprehended this view in the full
force of its simplicity.

Let us humor it for a while, for it has advantages in the way of
exposition.

_Voluntary action, then, is at all times a resultant of the compounding
of our impulsions with our inhibitions._

From this it immediately follows that there will be two types of will,
in one of which impulsions will predominate, in the other inhibitions.
We may speak of them, if you like, as the precipitate and the obstructed
will, respectively. When fully pronounced, they are familiar to
everybody. The extreme example of the precipitate will is the maniac:
his ideas discharge into action so rapidly, his associative processes
are so extravagantly lively, that inhibitions have no time to arrive,
and he says and does whatever pops into his head without a moment of
hesitation.

Certain melancholiacs furnish the extreme example of the over-inhibited
type. Their minds are cramped in a fixed emotion of fear or
helplessness, their ideas confined to the one thought that for them life
is impossible. So they show a condition of perfect 'abulia,' or
inability to will or act. They cannot change their posture or speech or
execute the simplest command.

The different races of men show different temperaments in this regard.
The Southern races are commonly accounted the more impulsive and
precipitate: the English race, especially our New England branch of it,
is supposed to be all sicklied over with repressive forms of
self-consciousness, and condemned to express itself through a jungle of
scruples and checks.

The highest form of character, however, abstractly considered, must be
full of scruples and inhibitions. But action, in such a character, far
from being paralyzed, will succeed in energetically keeping on its way,
sometimes overpowering the resistances, sometimes steering along the
line where they lie thinnest.

Just as our extensor muscles act most truly when a simultaneous
contraction of the flexors guides and steadies them; so the mind of him
whose fields of consciousness are complex, and who, with the reasons for
the action, sees the reasons against it, and yet, instead of being
palsied,