We spoke in a previous chapter of choice as an integral function
of the organism. While choice, when two competing stimuli awake
competing mechanisms, may be non-cerebral in its nature, largely
speaking it is a function of the cerebrum, of the intelligence.
To choose is a constant work of the intelligence, just as to
doubt is an unavailing effort to find a choice. Choice blocked is
doubt, one of the unhappiest of mental states. I shall not
pretend to solve the mystery of WHO chooses,--WHAT chooses;
perhaps there is a constant immortal ego; perhaps there is built
up a series of permanently excited areas which give rise to ego
feeling and predominate in choice; perhaps competing mechanisms,
as they struggle (in Sherrington's sense) for motor pathways,
give origin to the feeling of choice. At any rate, because we
choose is the reason that the concept of will has arisen in the
minds of both philosopher and the man in the street, and much of
our feeling of worth, individuality and power--mental factors of
huge importance in character--arises from the power to choose.
Choice is influenced by--or it is a net result of--the praise and
blame of others, conscience, memory, knowledge of the past, plans
for the future. It is the fulcrum point of conduct!
That animals have intelligence in the sense in which I have used
the term is without doubt. No one who reads the work of Morgan,
the Peckhams, Fabre, Hobhouse and other recent investigators of
the instincts can doubt it. Whether animals think in anything
like the form our thought takes is another matter. We are so
largely verbal in thought that speech and the capacity to speak
seem intimately related to thought. For the mechanics of thought,
for the laws of the association of ideas, the reader is referred
to the psychologists. That minds differ according to whether they
habitually follow one type of associations or another is an old
story. The most annoying individual in the world is the one whose
associations are unguided by a controlling purpose, who rambles
along misdirected by sound associations or by accidental
resemblances in structure of words, or by remote meanings,--who
starts off to tell you that she (the garrulous old lady) went to
the store to get some eggs, that she has a friend in the country
whose boy is in the army (aren't the Germans dreadful, she's glad
she's born in this country), city life is very hard, it isn't so
healthy as the country, thank God her health is good, etc.,
etc.," and she never arrives at the grocery store to buy the
eggs. The organizing of the associations through a goal idea is
part of that organizing energy of the mind and character
previously spoken of. The mind tends automatically to follow the
stimuli that reach it, but the organizing energy has as one of
its functions the preventing of this, and controlled thinking
follows associations that are, as it were, laid down by the goal.
In fatigue, in illness, in certain of the mental diseases, the
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