ABSTRACT
The central consciousness does appear to exercise a unique controlling influence upon the bulk of the activities of the organism. The control of thought, the control of ‘attention,’ consists in exactly the same psychological mechanism as the control of conduct by the determination of an idea, of a principle. In order to carry out any train of thinking, a task must be set to thought. Apart from that ideo-motor control which furnishes a relevant, consistent, ‘association’ of ideas, thought is naturally rhapsodic, incoherent. Undirected cogitative behaviour is what, but for the control of ideas, be they but the common conventions of civilized deportment, the external behaviour of a person would be who should walk the street and obey every primordial impulse as it arose, until safely locked up. That connection is the more manifest the more our mental processes are controlled by a directing purpose or ideo-motor principle, cognition.
