ns hang slack, and inhibitions
seem to exert peculiarly easy sway.

But let us now close in a little more closely on this matter of the
education of the will. Your task is to build up a _character_ in your
pupils; and a character, as I have so often said, consists in an
organized set of habits of reaction. Now of what do such habits of
reaction themselves consist? They consist of tendencies to act
characteristically when certain ideas possess us, and to refrain
characteristically when possessed by other ideas.

Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is
which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several
ideas with action or inaction respectively. How is it when an
alternative is presented to you for choice, and you are uncertain what
you ought to do? You first hesitate, and then you deliberate. And in
what does your deliberation consist? It consists in trying to
apperceive the ease successively by a number of different ideas, which
seem to fit it more or less, until at last you hit on one which seems to
fit it exactly. If that be an idea which is a customary forerunner of
action in you, which enters into one of your maxims of positive
behavior, your hesitation ceases, and you act immediately. If, on the
other hand, it be an idea which carries inaction as its habitual result,
if it ally itself with _prohibition_, then you unhesitatingly refrain.
The problem is, you see, to find the right idea or conception for the
case. This search for the right conception may take days or weeks.

I spoke as if the action were easy when the conception once is found.
Often it is so, but it may be otherwise; and, when it is otherwise, we
find ourselves at the very centre of a moral situation, into which I
should now like you to look with me a little nearer.

The proper conception, the true head of classification, may be hard to
attain; or it may be one with which we have contracted no settled habits
of action. Or, again, the action to which it would prompt may be
dangerous and difficult; or else inaction may appear deadly cold and
negative when our impulsive feeling is hot. In either of these latter
cases it is hard to hold the right idea steadily enough before the
attention to let it exert its adequate effects. Whether it be
stimulative or inhibitive, it is _too reasonable_ for us; and the more
instinctive passional propensity then tends to extrude it from our
consideration. We shy away f