come in contact. But whether through deliberate
or habitual conformity to one group as a norm, or the
deliberate organization of habits of action and feeling and
thought, on the basis of ideal or reflective standards, a man
comes to develop a more or less "permanent self." That is,
while men start with somewhat similar native equipments,
each man's set of inborn tendencies comes to be fixed in a
fairly definite and specific system. While all men start within
limits equally responsive and similarly responsive to all stimuli,
certain stimuli come to have the "right of way." They
are more or less easily and more or less readily responded to,
according as they do or as they do not fit in with the habit-organization
which the individual has previously acquired.

When we say that a man has no character or individuality,
we mean that he has developed no stable organization of actions,
feelings, and thoughts, with reference to which and by
the predominant drive of which his actions are determined.
There is no particular system of behavior which he has come
consciously to identify as his person or self; no interweaving
of motives and stimuli by the persistent momentum of which
his conduct is controlled; no single group of stimuli rather
than another has, in his pulpy person, attained priority in
stimulating power. Such men are chameleons rather than
characters. Their actions do not flow from a selfhood or
individuality at all; they are merely the random results of the
accidental situations in which such men find themselves.

The self exists, then, as a well-defined, systematic trend of
behavior. Impulses to action attain a certain order of priority
in an individual's conduct, and it is by the momentum of
these primary drives to action that his life is controlled.
What is commonly known as "will" is simply another name
for the power and momentum of a man's "personal self."
Will exists not as a thing, but as a process. To will an action
means to identify it consciously with one's permanent self, to
weigh and support it with all the emotions and energies connected
with one's consciously realized habitual system of behavior.
A man may bring to bear on the accomplishment of
a given action the deepest and most powerful motive forces of
his developed personality. To pass a course or make a team
a student may marshal all the habits of loyalty, of self-assertion
(and the emotional energies associated with them) which
have become th