=Development of Control: A. Ideo-motor Action.=--At first, on account of the close association between the thought centres and the motor centres causing the act, the child seems to have little ability to check the act, whenever its representative idea enters consciousness. It is for this reason that young children often perform such seemingly unreasonable acts as, for instance, slapping another person, kicking and throwing objects, etc. In such cases, however, it must not be assumed that these are always deliberate acts. More often the act is performed simply because the image of the act arises in the child's mind, and his control of the motor discharge is so weak that the act follows immediately upon the idea. This same tendency frequently manifests itself even in the adult. As one thinks intently of some favourite game, he may suddenly find himself taking a bodily position used in playing that game. It is by the same law also that the impulsive man tends to act out in gesture any act that he may be describing in words. Such a type of action is described as ideo-motor action. =B. Deliberate Action.=--Because the child in time gains ideas of various movements and an ability to fix his attention upon them, he thus becomes able to set one motor image against another as possible lines of action. One image may suggest to slap; the other to caress; the one to pull the weeds in the flower bed; the other, to lie down in the hammock. But attention is ultimately able, as noted in the last Chapter, so to control the impulse and resistance in the proper nervous centres that the acts themselves may be indefinitely suspended. Thus the mind becomes able to conceive lines of action and, by controlling bodily movement, gain time to consider the effectiveness of these toward the attainment of any end. When a bodily movement thus takes place in relation to some conscious end in view, it is termed a deliberate act. One important result of physical exercises with the young child is that they develop in him this deliberate control of bodily movements. The same may be said also of any orderly modes of action employed in the general management of the school. Regular forms of assembly and dismissal, of moving about the class-room, etc., all tend to give the child this same control over his acts.