In education, it is of very great value to organize all the mechanism useful in the production of personality at an early stage. Just as movement, the gymnastics of children, is necessary, because, as is well known, muscles which are not exercised become incapable of performing the variety of movements of which the muscular system is capable, so an analogous system of gymnastics is necessary to maintain the activity of the psychical life.
The uneducated organism may be easily directed towards subsequent deficiencies; he who is weak of muscle is inclined to remain motionless, and so to perish, when an action is necessary to overcome danger. Thus the child who is weak of will, who is "hypobulic" or "abulic," will readily adapt himself to a school where all the children are kept seated and motionless, listening, or pretending to listen. Many children of this kind, however, end in the hospital for nervous disorders and have the following notes on their school reports: "Conduct excellent; no progress in studies." Of such children some teachers confine themselves to such a remark as: "They are so good," and by this they tend to protect them from any intervention, and leave them to sink undisturbed into the weakness which threatens to engulf them like a quicksand. Other children, whose natural impulses are strong, are noted merely as creators of disorder, and are set down as "naughty." If we enquire into the nature of their naughtiness, we shall be told almost invariably that "they will never keep still." These turbulent spirits are further stigmatized as "aggressive to their companions," and their aggressions are nearly always of this kind: they try by every possible means to rouse their companions from their quiescence, and draw them into an association. There are also children in whom the inhibitory powers are dominant; their timidity is extreme: they sometimes seem as if they cannot make up their minds to answer a question; they will do so after some external stimulus, but in a very low voice, and will then burst into tears.
The necessary gymnastic in all these three cases is free action. The constant and interesting movement of others is the best of incitements to the abulic; motion directed into the channel of orderly exercise develops the inhibitory powers of the too impulsive child, and the child who is too much in subjection to his inhibitory powers, when liberated from the bondage of surveillance, and free to act privately on his own initiative—in other words, when he is removed from all external inducements to exercise inhibition, is able to find an equilibrium between the two opposite volitional forces. This is indeed the way of salvation for all men: that wherein the weak gain strength that wherein the strong attain perfection.
The want of balance as between impulse and inhibition is not only a familiar and interesting fact in pathology; it is further met with, though in a minor degree, among normal persons, just as frequently as deficiencies of education are to be met with in the external social sphere.
Impulse leads criminals to commit evil actions against other men; but how often normal persons have to regret thoughtless acts and nervous outbursts which have sad consequences to themselves! For the most part the normal impulsive person harms himself only, compromises his career, and is unable to bring his talents to fruition; he suffers from a conscious servitude, as from a misfortune from which he might perhaps have been saved.
He who is pathologically the victim of his own powers of inhibition is certainly the more unhappy sufferer; he remains immobile and silent; but internally he longs to move. A thousand impulses which can find no outlet torture the soul which aspires to art, to work; and eloquent speech on his own misfortunes would fain flow from his lips to implore help from a physician, or comfort from some lofty soul; but his lips are sealed. He feels the horrible oppression of one buried alive. But how many normal persons suffer from something of the same kind! On some propitious occasion in their lives they ought to have come forward and shown their worth, but they were unable to do so. A thousand times they have thought that a sincere expression of feeling might have straightened out a difficult situation; but the heart has closed and the lips have remained mute. How passionately they have longed to speak to some noble soul who would have understood them, illuminated and comforted them! But when they have been face to face with this person, they have been unable to speak a word. The longed-for individual encouraged them, questioned them, urged them to express themselves, but the sole response to the invitation was an internal anguish. Speak! Speak! said impulse in the depths of their consciousness; but inhibition was inexorable as a resistless material force.
It is in the education of the will by means of free exercises wherein the impulses balance the inhibitions that the cure of such subjects might be found, provided such a cure could be undertaken at the age when the will is in process of formation.
Such an equilibrium established as a mechanism at the margin of consciousness, which makes a man of the world "correct" in his conduct, is by no means that which constitutes the "person of will." It has been said above that the consciousness remains free for other voluntary requirements. The most refined and aristocratic lady might nevertheless be a person "without will" and "without character," although she might have acquired the most rigorous mechanisms productive of a mechanical will directed solely to external objects.