ncy, a line of
conduct for each of his company, all marked out or supplied on the
spur of the moment by his own quick sense of appropriate action; and
for him, as for no one else, to hesitate is to be lost.

Now what this general policy or method of growth means to his
consciousness is becoming more and more clear in the light of the
theory of mental types. The reason a person is motor is that his mind
tends always to be filled up most easily with memories or revived
images of the twitchings, tensions, contractions, expansions, of the
activities of the muscular system. He is a motor because the means of
his thought generally, the mental coins which pass current in his
thought exchange, are muscular sensations or the traces which such
sensations have left in his memory. The very means by which he thinks
of a situation, an event, a duty, is not the way it looked, or the way
it sounded, or the way it smelt, tasted, or felt to the touch--in any
of the experiences to which these senses are involved--but the means,
the representatives, the instruments of his thought, are the feelings
of the way he has acted. He has a tendency--and he comes to have it
more and more--to get a muscular representation of everything; and his
gauge of the value of this or that is this muscular measure of it, in
terms of the action which it is calculated to draw out.

It is then this preference for one particular kind of mental imagery,
and that the motor, or muscular kind, which gives this type of child
his peculiarity in this more psychological period. When we pass from
the mere outward and organic description of his peculiarities,
attempted above in the case of very young children, and aim to
ascertain the mental peculiarity which accompanies it and carries on
the type through the individual's maturer years, we see our way to its
meaning. The fact is that a peculiar kind of mental imagery tends to
swell up in consciousness and monopolize the theatre of thought. This
is only another way of saying that the attention is more or less
educated in the direction represented by this sort of imagery. Every
time a movement is thought of, in preference to a sound or a sight
which is also available, the habit of giving the attention to the
muscular equivalents of things becomes more firmly fixed. This
continues until the motor habit of attention becomes the only easy and
normal way of attending; and then the person is fixed in his type for
one, many, or al