By promoting or repressing expression we do certainly influence emotion; but this volition is always for reason, and implies, then, a conflict of feelings. Thus, a feeling for propriety leads the man to control his tears, and this feeling in itself must tend to diminish the strength of the concomitant grief. However, though there is a measure of interference, we would be wrong in supposing that complex mental life is always comparatively weak in its component elements. The distraction of interest due to new feelings checking expression is not always equal to the relieving power of free or promoted expression. The direct checking of the expressional act certainly keeps back the current of energy from its natural channel, and the feeling has increased in duration, if not in quantity. The evanescent character of emotion with young children and with demonstrative people is well known. But besides the changes which may come to the feeling through direct will-effected changes in the expression, we must also note that the mere consciousness of expression has often a definite influence. Thus, when greatly frightened, I may become conscious of the heart leaping into the throat, the trembling, etc.; and this consciousness of the expression acts in general as a diversion in the feeling which is expressed. Sometimes, indeed, it seems to add to the feeling, as when a girl blushes for her blushes. There is an intensification of self-consciousness which but heightens and renews the expression with renewed sense of expression, and then another flood of embarrassing self-consciousness, and so on in a long series. Here, however, the sense of expression does not in strictness add to the intensity of the original feeling, but it develops a new feeling of the same kind; at each step there is new occasion and a renewed feeling, but a total quantity is constituted, so that we are right enough in saying that the consciousness of her own blushing but added to her embarrassment. Yet it may be stated as a general law that a consciousness of our expressive acts as such tends to decrease the original feeling from which the expression arises, inasmuch as the field of consciousness is thereby divided.