The more I have observed and reflected, the more limited seems to me the field of action of the human will.Every act of choice involves a special relation between the ego and the conditions before it.But no man knows what forces are at work in the determination of his ego.
The bias which decides his choice between two or more motives may come from some unsuspected ancestral source, of which he knows nothing at all.He is automatic in virtue of that hidden spring of reflex action, all the time having the feeling that he is self-determining.The Story of Elsie Yenner, written-soon after this book was published, illustrates the direction in which my thought was moving.'The imaginary subject of the story obeyed her will, but her will Obeyed the mysterious antenatal poisoning influence.
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That silly little drum they are always beating on, and the trumpet and the feather they make so much noise and cut such a figure with, we have not quite outgrown, but play with much less seriously and constantly than they do.Then there is a whole museum of wigs, and masks, and lace-coats, and gold-sticks, and grimaces, and phrases, which we laugh at honestly, without affectation, that are still used in the Old-World puppet-shows.I don't think we on our part ever understand the Englishman's concentrated loyalty and specialized reverence.But then we do think more of a man, as such, (barring some little difficulties about race and complexion which the Englishman will touch us on presently,) than any people that ever lived did think of him.Our reverence is a great deal wider, if it is less intense.We have caste among us, to some extent; it is true;but there is never a collar on the American wolf-dog such as you often see on the English mastiff, notwithstanding his robust, hearty individuality.
This confronting of two civilizations is always a grand sensation to me; it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans swim into each other's laps.The trouble is, it is so difficult to let out the whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming to take a personal character.But I never enjoy the Englishman so much as when he talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the Peruvians.Then you get the real British flavor, which the cosmopolite Englishman loses.
How much better this thorough interpenetration of ideas than a barren interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his opponent as the tangled thicket of the disputed ground will let him!
---My thoughts flow in layers or strata, at least three deep.Ifollow a slow person's talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current of my own beneath it.Under both runs obscurely a consciousness belonging to a third train of reflections, independent of the two others.I will try to write out a Mental movement in three parts.
A.---First voice, or Mental Soprano,--thought follows a woman talking.
B.--Second voice, or Mental Barytone,--my running accompaniment.
C.--Third voice, or Mental Basso,--low grumble of importunate self-repeating idea.
A.--White lace, three skirts, looped with flowers, wreath of apple-blossoms, gold bracelets, diamond pin and ear-rings, the most delicious berthe you ever saw, white satin slippers-B.--Deuse take her! What a fool she is! Hear her chatter! (Look out of window just here.--Two pages and a half of description, if it were all written out, in one tenth of a second.)--Go ahead, old lady!
(Eye catches picture over fireplace.) There's that infernal family nose! Came over in the "Mayflower" on the first old fool's face.
Why don't they wear a ring in it?
C.--You 'll be late at lecture,--late at lecture,--late,--late-I observe that a deep layer of thought sometimes makes itself felt through the superincumbent strata, thus:--The usual single or double currents shall flow on, but there shall be an influence blending with them, disturbing them in an obscure way, until all at once I say,--Oh, there! I knew there was something troubling me,--and the thought which had been working through comes up to the surface clear, definite, and articulates itself,--a disagreeable duty, perhaps, or an unpleasant recollection.
The inner world of thought and the outer world of events are alike in this, that they are both brimful.There is no space between consecutive thoughts, or between the never-ending series of actions.
All pack tight, and mould their surfaces against each other, so that in the long run there is a wonderful average uniformity in the forms of both thoughts and actions, just as you find that cylinders crowded all become hexagonal prisms, and spheres pressed together are formed into regular polyhedra.
Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped by him.So, to carry out, with another comparison, my remark about the layers of thought, we may consider the mind as it moves among thoughts or events, like a circus-rider whirling round with a great troop of horses.He can mount a fact or an idea, and guide it more or less completely, but he cannot stop it.So, as I said in another way at the beginning, he can stride two or three thoughts at once, but not break their steady walk, trot, or gallop.He can only take his foot from the saddle of one thought and put it on that of another.
--What is the saddle of a thought? Why, a word, of course.--Twenty years after you have dismissed a thought, it suddenly wedges up to you through the press, as if it had been steadily galloping round and round all that time without a rider.
The will does not act in the interspaces of thought, for there are no such interspaces, but simply steps from the back of one moving thought upon that of another.
