Your Mind and How to Use It: A Manual of Practical PsychologyAtkinson, William Walker
Science
Your Mind and How to Use It: A Manual of Practical Psychology
Atkinson, William Walker
Psychology
The influence of the trained will upon the several mental faculties is
most marked. There are no faculties which may not be cultivated by the
will. The first and great task of the will in this direction is the
control and direction of the attention. The will determines the kind of
interest that shall prevail at the moment, and the kind of interest
largely determines the character of the man, his tastes, his feelings,
his thoughts, his acts. Gordy says: "Coöperating with a pre-existing
influence, the will can make a weaker one prevail over a stronger. * * *
It determines which of pre-existing influences shall have control over
the mind."
Moreover, concentrated and continued attention depends entirely upon the
exercise of the will. As Gordy says: "If the will relaxes its hold upon
the activities of the mind, the attention is liable to be carried away
by any one of the thousands of ideas that the laws of association are
constantly bringing into our minds."
Even in the matter of mental images the will asserts its sway, and the
imagination may be trained to be the obedient servant of the developed
will. Regarding the influence of the will upon character, Davidson says:
"It is not enough for a man to understand correctly and love duly the
conditions of moral life in his own time; he must, still further, be
willing and able to fulfill these conditions. And he certainly cannot do
this unless his will is trained to perfect freedom, so that it responds,
with the utmost readiness, to the suggestions of his discriminating
intelligence and the movements of his chastened affections." Halleck
says: "We gradually make our characters by separate acts of will, just
as a blacksmith by repeated blows beats out a horseshoe or an anchor
from a shapeless mass of iron. A finished anchor or horseshoe was never
the product of a single blow."
TRAINING THE WILL.
Perhaps the best way to train the will is to _use_ it intelligently, and
with a purpose. The training of any faculty of the mind is at the same
time a training of the will. The attention being so closely allied to
the will, it follows that a careful training of attention will result in
a strengthening of the will. The training of the emotional side of one's
nature also brings results in the strengthening of the will.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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