_The passage from an impulsive action to an artificial reflex may be regarded, broadly, as an example of the effect of practice._ We have seen that improvement in such activity as piano-playing depends, not solely upon repetition, but largely also upon changes in our method of working; upon the sudden discovery of some new trick of procedure, or the sudden release from some hampering peculiarity of method (p. 170). Turning-points of this same sort are characteristic of the path from impulse to reflex; we do not find a gradual refining of movement and a corresponding simplification of its mental accompaniments; the history is rather a matter of short-cuts and substitutions; the organic machine is too complicated, too sensitive, has too great a variety of resources, to follow a beaten track. So the course of impulsive action, though it be downhill, cannot be expected to run smooth. § 58. =The Development of Action: From Impulsive to Selective and Volitional.=—Action appears in its simplest form when it is singly or unequivocally determined (p. 235); and this implies that actions of more complicated form are multiply or equivocally determined. What that means you will see at once if you recall the development of attention. Primary passes into secondary attention because we have many sense-organs, all of them open to manifold stimulation at the same time, and because we have many different lines of interest, several of which may be appealed to by the situation in which we chance to find ourselves; there are rival claimants for the centre of the field of attention. _Impulsive passes into_ =selective= _action_, in precisely the same way, _when the nervous system is the seat of a conflict of impulsive tendencies_. The passage, however, is not made at one step; the conflict of impulses may remain a mere conflict of impulses, without rising to the pitch of selective action. We have already had an instance: the young child, face to face with a strange dog, behaves as if pulled back and forth by strings; it goes toward the dog, runs back to its father, approaches the dog again, shrinks back again, and so on. It has happened to the author, in presence of the two impulses to shut a door on the right and to seat himself at a desk on the left, to begin the right-hand movement towards the door, and then all at once to slue around to the desk without having closed it. In such cases, the organism acts impulsively or instinctively, but acts nevertheless under a dual determination; the instincts or impulses are in conflict. Buridan’s ass, starving to death between its two bundles of hay, illustrates the logical outcome of an exact equality of the conflicting tendencies.