Nature of Will.—When voluntary attention is fixed, as above, upon the results of conflicting lines of action, the mind is said to experience a conflict of desires, or motives. So long as this conflict lasts, physical expression is inhibited, the mind deliberating upon and comparing the conflicting motives. For instance, a pupil on his way to school may be thrown into a conflict of motives. On the one side is a desire to remain under the trees near the bank of the stream; on the other a desire to obey his parents, and go to school. So long as these desires each press themselves upon the attention, there results an inhibiting of the nervous motor discharge with an accompanying mental state of conflict, or indecision. This prevents, for the time being, any action, and the youth deliberates between the two possible lines of conduct. As he weighs the various elements of pleasure on the one hand and of duty on the other, the one desire will finally appear the stronger. This constitutes the person's choice, or decision, and a line of action follows in accordance with the end, or motive, chosen. This mental choice, or decision, is usually termed an act of will.
Attention in Will.—Such a choice between motives, however, evidently involves an act of voluntary attention. What really goes on in consciousness in such a conflict of motives is that voluntary attention makes a single problem of the twofold situation—school versus play. To this problem the attention marshals relative ideas and selects and adjusts them to the complex problem. Finally these are built into an organized experience which solves the problem as one, say, of going to school. The so-called choice is, therefore, merely the mental solution of the situation; the necessary bodily action follows in an habitual manner, once the attention lessens the resistance in the appropriate centres.
Factors in Volitional Act.—Such an act of volition, or will, is usually analysed in the following steps:
1. Conflicting desires
2. Deliberation—weighing of motives
3. Choice—solving the problem
4. Expression.
As a mental process, however, an act of will does not include the fourth step—expression. The mind has evidently willed, the moment a conclusion, or choice, is reached in reference to the end in view. If, therefore, I stand undecided whether to paint the house white or green, an act of will has taken place when the conclusion, or mental decision, has been reached to paint the house green. On the other hand, however, only the man who forms a decision and then resolutely works out his decision through actual expression, will be credited with a strong will by the ordinary observer.
Physical Conditions of Will.—Deliberation being but a special case of giving voluntary attention to a selected problem, it involves the same expenditure of nervous energy in overcoming resistance within the brain centres as was seen to accompany any act of voluntary attention. Such being the case, our power of will at any given time is likely to vary in accordance with our bodily condition. The will is relatively weak during sickness, for instance, because the normal amount of nervous energy which must accompany the mental processes of deliberation and choice is not able to be supplied. For the same reason, lack of food and sleep, working in bad air, etc., are found to weaken the will for facing a difficulty, though we may nevertheless feel that it is something that ought to be done. An added reason, therefore, why the victim of alcohol and narcotics finds it difficult to break his habit is that the use of these may permanently lessen the energy of the nervous organism. In facing the difficult task of breaking an old habit, therefore, this person has rendered the task doubly difficult, because the indulgence has weakened his will for undertaking the struggle of breaking an old habit. On the other hand, good food, sleep, exercise in the fresh air, by quickening the blood and generating nervous energy, in a sense strengthens the will in undertaking the duties and responsibilities before it.