If you are struck by the materialistic or fatalistic doctrines which seem to follow this conception, I beg you to suspend your judgment for a moment, as I shall soon have something more to say about the matter.  But, meanwhile yielding one’s self to the mechanical conception of the psychophysical organism, nothing is easier than to indulge in a picture of the fatalistic character of human life.  Man’s conduct appears as the mere resultant of all his various impulsions and inhibitions.  One object, by its presence, makes us act:  another object checks our action.  Feelings aroused and ideas suggested by objects sway us one way and another:  emotions complicate the game by their mutual inhibitive effects, the higher abolishing the lower or perhaps being itself swept away.  The life in all this becomes prudential and moral; but the psychologic agents in the drama may be described, you see, as nothing but the ‘ideas’ themselves,—­ideas for the whole system of which what we call the ‘soul’ or character’ or ‘will’ of the person is nothing but a collective name.  As Hume said, the ideas are themselves the actors, the stage, the theatre, the spectators, and the play.  This is the so-called ‘associationist’ psychology, brought down to its radical expression:  it is useless to ignore its power as a conception.  Like all conceptions, when they become 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.