It must be remembered that the world we live in has its great habits. Night follows day in a cycle that never fails, the seasons are repeated each year, and there is a periodicity in the lives of plants and animals that is manifested in growth, nutrition, mating and resting. Things happen again and again, though in slightly altered form, and our desires, satisfied now, soon repeat their urge. The great organic needs and sensations repeat themselves and with the periodic world of outer experience must be dealt with according to a more or less settled policy. It is the organizing energy that works out the policy, that learns, inhibits, chooses and acts,--and it is the essential character-developing principle. For like our bodily organs which are whipped into line by the nervous system, our impulses, instincts, and reflexes[1] have their own policy of action and therefore need, for the good of the entire organism, discipline and coordination. It may sound as if the body were made up of warring entities and states and that there gradually arose a centralized good, and though the analogy may lead to error, it offers a convenient method of thinking. [1] Roux, the great French biologist, has shown that each tissue and each cell competes with the other tissues and the other cells. The organism, though it reaches a practical working unity as viewed by consciousness, is nevertheless no entity; it is a collection, an aggregate of living cells which are organized on a cooperation basis just as men are, but maintain individuality and competition nevertheless. Moreover, the organizing energy seems often to be at work when consciousness itself is at rest, as in sleep. Often enough a man debates and debates on lines of conduct and wakes up with his problem solved. Or he works hard to learn and goes to bed discouraged, because the matter is a jumble, and wakes up in the morning with an orderly and useful arrangement of the facts. A writer seeks to find the proper opening,--and gives up in a frenzy of despair. He is perhaps walking or driving when suddenly he lifts his head as one does who is listening to a longed-for voice, and in himself he finds the phrases that he longs for. Something within has set itself, so it seems, the task of bringing the right associations into consciousness. What we call quickness of mind, energy of mind, is largely this function.