Yet it is not strictly true to say that they move of themselves. They are under control, and the successive steps follow upon each other not without direction. They serve as expressions of the will to take the walk, and they are adjusted to the end consciously held in view. That attention is not fixed upon the individual steps does not remove them from the sphere of the voluntary, in a proper sense of the words. They are expressions of the man's will, even if they be not the result of a conscious series of deliberations and decisions. Whether we shall use the term decision in connection with the single step is rather a question of verbal usage than of the determination of fact. We have seen that decisions shade down gradually, from those quite unmistakable and characteristic, to occurrences far less characteristic and more disputable. The consciousness of deliberation and decision does not disappear abruptly at some point in the series. It fades away, as the light of day gradually passes, through twilight, into the shades of night. And actions not directly recognizable as consciously voluntary may be obviously under voluntary control. They weave themselves, with actions more palpably voluntary and higher in the scale, into those complicated patterns determined by the conscious selection of an end. As long as they serve their purpose, and require no effort, they may remain inconspicuous and unconsidered. But, as soon as a check is met with, attention is directed upon them and they become the subject of conscious voluntary control. 38. ENDS NOT CONSCIOUSLY CHOSEN.--In the above illustration the end which determines the character of a long chain of actions has been deliberately chosen. It is a consciously selected end. When, however, we contemplate critically the lives of our fellow-men, we seem to become aware of the fact that many of them act in unconsciousness of the ultimate end upon which their actions converge. The attention is taken up with minor decisions, and takes no note of the permanent trend of the will. Thus, the selfish man may be unaware of the significance of the whole series of choices which he makes in a day; the malicious man may not realize that he is animated by the settled purpose to injure his neighbors; one may be law-abiding without ever having resolved to obey the laws through the course of a life. If called upon to account for this or that subordinate decision, each may exhaust his ingenuity in assigning false causes, while ignoring the permanent attitude of the will revealed in the series of decisions as a whole and giving them what consistency they possess.