[Illustration: FIG. 19.--Star for mirror drawing. The mirror breaks up the automatic control previously developed, and requires one to start out much as the child does at the beginning. See text for directions.] To illustrate this law try the following experiment: Draw on a piece of cardboard a star, like figure 19, making each line segment two inches. Seat yourself at a table with the star before you, placing a mirror back of the star so that it can be seen in the mirror. Have someone hold a screen a few inches above the table so as to hide the star from your direct view, but so that you can see it in the mirror. Now reach your hand under the screen and trace with a pencil around the star from left to right, not taking your pencil off the paper until you get clear around. Keep track of how long it takes to go around and also note the irregular wanderings of your pencil. Try this experiment five times over, noting the decrease in time and effort required, and the increase in efficiency as the movements tend to become automatic. VOLITIONAL ACTION.--While it is obvious that the various types of action already described include a very large proportion of all our acts, yet they do not include all. For there are some acts that are neither reflex nor instinctive nor automatic, but that have to be performed under the stress of compulsion and effort. We constantly meet situations where the necessity for action or restraint runs counter to our inclinations. We daily are confronted by the necessity of making decisions in which the mind must be compelled by effort to take this direction or that direction. Conflicting motives or tendencies create frequent necessity for coercion. It is often necessary to drive our bark counter to the current of our desires or our habits, or to enter into conflict with a temptation. VOLITION ACTS IN THE MAKING OF DECISIONS.--Everyone knows for himself the state of inward unrest which we call indecision. A thought enters the mind which would of itself prompt an act; but before the act can occur, a contrary idea appears and the act is checked; another thought comes favoring the act, and is in turn counterbalanced by an opposing one. The impelling and inhibiting ideas we call _motives_ or _reasons_ for and against the proposed act. While we are balancing the motives against each other, we are said to _deliberate_. This process of deliberation must go on, if we continue to think about the matter at all, until one set of ideas has triumphed over the other and secured the attention. When this has occurred, we have _decided_, and the deliberation is at an end. We have exercised the highest function of the will and made a _choice_.