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Page 40
But be our conceptions adequate or inadequate, and be our stock of them
large or small, they are all we have to work with. If an educated man
is, as I said, a group of organized tendencies to conduct, what prompts
the conduct is in every case the man's conception of the way in which to
name and classify the actual emergency. The more adequate the stock of
ideas, the more 'able' is the man, the more uniformly appropriate is his
behavior likely to be. When later we take up the subject of the will, we
shall see that the essential preliminary to every decision is the
finding of the right _names_ under which to class the proposed
alternatives of conduct. He who has few names is in so far forth an
incompetent deliberator. The names--and each name stands for a
conception or idea--are our instruments for handling our problems and
solving our dilemmas. Now, when we think of this, we are too apt to
forget an important fact, which is that in most human beings the stock
of names and concepts is mostly acquired during the years of adolescence
and the earliest years of adult life. I probably shocked you a moment
ago by saying that most men begin to be old fogies at the age of
twenty-five. It is true that a grown-up adult keeps gaining well into
middle age a great knowledge of details, and a great acquaintance with
individual cases connected with his profession or business life. In
this sense, his conceptions increase during a very long period; for his
knowledge grows more extensive and minute. But the larger categories of
conception, the sorts of thing, and wider classes of relation between
things, of which we take cognizance, are all got into the mind at a
comparatively youthful date. Few men ever do acquaint themselves with
the principles of a new science after even twenty-five. If you do not
study political economy in college, it is a thousand to one that its
main conceptions will remain unknown to you through life. Similarly with
biology, similarly with electricity. What percentage of persons now
fifty years old have any definite conception whatever of a dynamo, or
how the trolley-cars are made to run? Surely, a small fraction of one
per cent. But the boys in colleges are all acquiring these conceptions.
There is a sense of infinite potentiality in us all, when young, which
makes some of us draw up lists of books we intend to read hereafter, and
makes most of us think that we can easily acquaint ourselves with all
sorts of things which we are now neglecting by studying them out
hereafter in the intervals of leisure of our business lives. Such good
intentions are hardly ever carried out. The conceptions acquired before
thirty remain usually the only ones we ever gain. Such exceptional cases
of perpetually self-renovating youth as Mr. Gladstone's only prove, by
the admiration they awaken, the universality of the rule. And it may
well solemnize a teacher, and confirm in him a healthy sense of the
importance of his mission, to feel how exclusively dependent upon his
present ministrations in the way of imparting conceptions the pupil's
future life is probably bound to be.
XV. THE WILL
Since mentality terminates naturally in outward conduct, the final
chapter in psychology has to be the chapter on the will. But the word
'will' can be used in a broader and in a narrower sense. In the broader
sense, it designates our entire capacity for impulsive and active life,
including our instinctive reactions and those forms of behavior that
have become secondarily automatic and semi-unconscious through frequent
repetition. In the narrower sense, acts of will are such acts only as
cannot be inattentively performed. A distinct idea of what they are, and
a deliberate _fiat_ on the mind's part, must precede their execution.
Such acts are often characterized by hesitation, and accompanied by a
feeling, altogether peculiar, of resolve, a feeling which may or may not
carry with it a further feeling of effort. In my earlier talks, I said
so much of our impulsive tendencies that I will restrict myself in what
follows to volition in this narrower sense of the term.
All our deeds were considered by the early psychologists to be due to a
peculiar faculty called the will, without whose fiat action could not
occur. Thoughts and impressions, being intrinsically inactive, were
supposed to produce conduct only through the intermediation of this
superior agent. Until they twitched its coat-tails, so to speak, no
outward behavior could occur. This doctrine was long ago exploded by the
discovery of the phenomena of reflex action, in which sensible
impressions, as you know, produce movement immediately and of
themselves. The doctrine may also be considered exploded as far as ideas
go.
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