Apply this evidence, now, to the case in point! The sound of the alarum-clock is, on the face of it, a positive suggestion, bidding me get up; but every suggestion is really two-faced; if it sets off certain of the tendencies natural to the situation, it also checks others. The sound of the bell, therefore, not only reinforces the getting-up tendencies, but also represses the nervous disposition that tends to keep me lying still. In the same way, the idea of further sleep means not only the reinforcement of this disposition to lie still, but also, on the negative side, a blocking of the suggestion from the alarum-clock. The situation offers the alternatives ‘action’ and ‘no action’; but the nerve-forces which the situation calls into play, and which correspond with these alternatives, both alike bear upon ‘action,’ as both alike bear upon ‘no action.’ _The conflict is thus, after all, of the same kind as in selective action._ Idea does not oppose impulse, nor does activity oppose passivity; but nerve-forces which make for action and against rest oppose nerve-forces which make for rest and against action; the double-faced nature of the nervous mechanism is the key to the riddle. The particular ‘action’ and the particular mode of ‘no action’ are, naturally, determined by the situation itself. _If these selective and volitional actions are often repeated, choice is likely to give way to habit_; some one impulse gains predominance over the rest; and then, as if to pay the price of victory, speedily falls to the sensorimotor or ideomotor form, and finally lapses into an artificial reflex. When we are learning to play a musical instrument, our actions are one and all selective; we have to think which dot upon the staff stands for which note upon the keys, and which finger is to be set down where. When we have become adepts, the bare sight of the printed score touches off the appropriate movements; we play ‘instinctively’ in the right key, in the right tempo, with the right emphasis; we may even carry on a conversation, and still play correctly, though we have never seen the score before. The practised speaker does not ‘choose’ his words; his ideas express themselves for him; he may even run ahead in thought, while his larynx is still busy with the present topic. The road to automatism is that with which we are already familiar (p. 245), though the psychological history of the automatic actions is different. § 59. =The Compound Reaction.=—The detailed analyses that we felt the need of on p. 249 ought, by rights, to be provided by the reaction experiment; for that, as we said on p. 239, furnishes an outline-plan of experimental work which can be filled in and complicated in all manner of ways. Why, then, should not selective and volitional action be as manageable as impulsive? and why should we not follow, experimentally, the rise of impulse to choice and its later return to impulse?