will-power of the individual advising whether we accept the advice or
reject it. This character often depends little, if at all, in some cases,
upon the intellect, or even upon the moral qualities, the goodness or
badness, of the individual. It is itself an imponderable something; yet it
carries weight with it. There may be abler men, cleverer men; but it is
the one possessed of will who rises to the surface at these times--the one
who can by some subtle power make other men obey him.

"The will-power goes on universally. In the young aristocrat who gets his
tailor to make another advance in defiance of his conviction that he will
never get his money back. It goes on between lawyer and client; betwixt
doctor and patient; between banker and borrower; betwixt buyer and seller.
It is not tact which enables the person behind the counter to induce
customers to buy what they did not intend to buy, and which bought, gives
them no satisfaction, though it is linked therewith for the effort to be
successful. Whenever two persons meet in business, or in any other
relation in life, up to love-making, there is this will-fight going on,
commonly enough without any consciousness of the struggle. There is a dim
consciousness of the result, but none of the processes. It often takes
years of the intimacy of married life to find out with whom of the pair
the mastery really lies. Often the far stronger character, to all
appearances, has to yield; it is this will-element which underlies the
statement: 'The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the
strong.' In Middle-march' we find in Lydgate a grand aggregation of
qualities, yet shallow, hard, selfish Rosamond masters him thoroughly in
the end. He was not deficient in will-power; possessed more than an
average amount of character; but in the fight he went down at last under
the onslaught of the intense, stubborn will of his narrow-minded spouse.
Their will-contest was the collision of a large warm nature, like a
capable human hand, with a hard, narrow selfish nature, like a steel
button; the hand only bruised itself while the button remained
unaffected."

You must not, however, imagine that every person with whom you engage in
one of these psychic duels is conscious of what is going on. He usually
recognizes that some sort of conflict is under way, but he does not know
the laws and principles of psychic force, and so is in the dark regarding
the procedure. You will find that a