bedient child; and upon an accumulation of petty failures to obey I act upon the injunction of a contemporary sage, 'Never punish a child except in anger.' With the aid of this emphasis I secure compliance, and am satisfied. But quite possibly after some time my sense of triumph may fade. I defined my wish in terms of compliance, and I gained it; but what I gained was not what I wanted,—the error was in my understanding of my own wish. I may be puzzled to know in what respect I have failed; for what is now required is a new effort at analysis, a new hypothesis, an essentially inductive achievement in naming what was wrong and so revising my definition. I may emerge with the supposition that what will satisfy me is a free compliance, or one based on confidence rather than on necessity. But whatever the outcome, the process is a dialectic process. It might be called the dialectic of the will.
Like the Platonic dialectic of concepts, it assumes that the judgment of denotation is more certain than the judgment of analysis of connotation. The judgment of denotation here takes the form: This experience is, or is not, a case of what I wish. And as in the Platonic dialectic, the certainty, in turn, of this judgment of denotation depends upon the presence of a 'subconscious' knowledge of what, in connotation, I want.
The distinction between this process and the first-named process of learning from experience of pleasure and pain may appear in this, that this 'mental after-image' is more potent than pleasures or pains to determine the history of a wish. Thus, a fight may be attended with much pain and subsequent discomfort; but if the after-image is gratifying, the pain seems to have a wholly negligible effect in deterring the enthusiastic fighter. The agony of childbirth does not deter the normal mother from again entering the same cycle of experience. And on the other hand a slight shade of dissatisfaction in the after-image may nullify the effect of the keenest pleasure in inducing a repetition of the successful behavior. If pain is, in Sherrington's sense, 'prepotent' as a stimulus; the mental after-image is 'prepotent' (or has become so in the human species) in fixing the definitions of wishes, and so in determining habits.
