me cause. With his mind's eye he sees his ball alighting in the most
unfavourable spot. He may use any club he likes, he may make a long
drive or a short; as long as the thought of the bunker dominates his
mind, the ball will inevitably find its way into it. The more he calls
on his will to help him, the worse his plight is likely to be. Success
is not gained by effort but by right thinking. The champion golfer or
tennis-player is not a person of herculean frame and immense
will-power. His whole life has been dominated by the thought of
success in the game at which he excels.

Young persons sitting for an examination sometimes undergo this painful
experience. On reading through their papers they find that all their
knowledge has suddenly deserted them. Their mind is an appalling blank
and not one relevant thought can they recall. The more they grit their
teeth and summon the powers of the will, the further the desired ideas
flee. But when they have left the examination-room and the tension
relaxes, the ideas they were seeking flow tantalisingly back into the
mind. Their forgetfulness was due to thoughts of failure previously
nourished in the mind. The application of the will only made the
disaster more complete.

This explains the baffling experience of the drug-taker, the drunkard,
the victim of some vicious craving. His mind is obsessed by the desire
for satisfaction. The efforts of the will to restrain it only make it
more overmastering. Repeated failures convince him at length that he
is powerless to control himself, and this idea, operating as an
autosuggestion, increases his impotence. So in despair, he abandons
himself to his obsession, and his life ends in wreckage.

We can now see, not only that the Will is incapable of vanquishing a
thought, but that as fast as the Will brings up its big guns, Thought
captures them and turns them against it.

This truth, which Baudouin calls the Law of Reversed Effort, is thus
stated by Coue:

"_When the Imagination and the Will are in conflict the Imagination
invariably gains the day._"

"_In the conflict between the Will and the Imagination, the force of
the Imagination is in direct ratio to the square of the Will._"

The mathematical terms are used, of course, only metaphorically.

Thus the Will turns out to be, not the commanding monarch of life, as
many people would have it, but a blind Samson, capable either of
turning the mill or of pulling down