A Will must have power, else it cannot move at all. And it must have the direction of that power, else it has no choice as to the way in which it shall move. X, being an impulse and a desire, may be said to have power. But McDougall puts it within an acquired striving trend, and my dictionary tells me that a trend is an inclination to move in a particular direction--which is precisely what an instinct is. The channel, you will note, has already been dug. Whatever was acquired was foredoomed to be acquired. The ideal of conduct which the “I” formulated and accepted lay hidden from the first, with no possibility of its being rejected in favor of some other ideal. The “balance sheet” of the Law of Conservation has been retained, all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. McDougall has also attempted to make a Will out of attention. Now attention is probably the slightest piece of luggage of all our inner impedimenta. It is such a little thing. It weighs almost nothing. Can’t we get at least “attention” past the old-fashioned scientific custom-house without paying duty under the Conservation law? This looks at first like a feasible scheme. But the customsmen are lynx-eyed. Once we submit to their jurisdiction they will let nothing pass, though it weigh less than the tiniest bit of fuzz off the end of a feather boa. Thus far McDougall has been held up as an undesirable citizen by these hoary custodians, and not allowed to land in Mechanistia. They have been alarmed by the suspicious manner of the traveler. But in thinking that he has any free will hidden in his theoretical baggage they are deceived. This “interest” or “attention” with which we have to deal, is “conative.”[40] And conation is “a convenient Latin word ... to denote the striving aspect of the mental processes.”[41] I am afraid that it is all it is, a convenient Latin word. For “instinct” too is a “direct conative trend.”[42] Here we have two kinds of striving, only one of which is said to be direct, that is to have a direction. But this directed striving comes first; it is in-born, instinctive. Naturally so is instinct, “a disposition which determines its possessor to perceive, and to pay attention to, objects of a certain class.” But in trying to find a Will it is precisely this determining which we are interested in. We don’t care what makes the water run in the ditch, we want to know what digs the ditch. In McDougall it is always instinct. He has studied insects too much. He has seen too many lunatics whose wills were paralyzed. “Instinctively” he gives us only the mechanisms which he thinks he finds in grasshoppers.