When we say that a man has no character or individuality, we mean that he has developed no stable organization of actions, feelings, and thoughts, with reference to which and by the predominant drive of which his actions are determined. There is no particular system of behavior which he has come consciously to identify as his person or self; no interweaving of motives and stimuli by the persistent momentum of which his conduct is controlled; no single group of stimuli rather than another has, in his pulpy person, attained priority in stimulating power. Such men are chameleons rather than characters. Their actions do not flow from a selfhood or individuality at all; they are merely the random results of the accidental situations in which such men find themselves. The self exists, then, as a well-defined, systematic trend of behavior. Impulses to action attain a certain order of priority in an individual's conduct, and it is by the momentum of these primary drives to action that his life is controlled. What is commonly known as "will" is simply another name for the power and momentum of a man's "personal self." Will exists not as a thing, but as a process. To will an action means to identify it consciously with one's permanent self, to weigh and support it with all the emotions and energies connected with one's consciously realized habitual system of behavior. A man may bring to bear on the accomplishment of a given action the deepest and most powerful motive forces of his developed personality. To pass a course or make a team a student may marshal all the habits of loyalty, of self-assertion (and the emotional energies associated with them) which have become the leading ingredients of his character. The "permanent self" becomes involved in the same way in the case of willing _not_ to perform a certain action. Any stimulus may, on occasion, be strong even if it has ceased to be characteristic or habitual in a man's behavior. This is particularly the case with some of the primary physical drives to action. Even the ascetic feels the strong sting of sense-desire. A man in resisting temptation, in denying the pressure of an immediate stimulus, is setting up to block or inhibit it all the contrary reactions and emotions which have become part of the "permanent self." In more familiar language he is setting will over against desire. The temporary desire may be strong, but it is consciously regarded by the individual as alien to his "real" or "better" self. And _will_ is this whole complex organization of the permanent self set over against an alien intruding impulse.