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It is action and reaction that are equal, not thought and reaction. The attention directs the activity and the subconsciousness responds. It is sufficient for the actively conscious state to establish the direction; it remains for the resulting activity to carry out the decision.*

Consequently, few discoveries are of greater practical value than the disclosure of the law of subconscious mental activity. For this apparently limitless realm below the threshold of our voluntary life exemplifies in unsurpassed degree nature's law of least resistance. That which we labour and groan to achieve consciously, comes easily and directly in the subconscious world. There friction is at its minimum. There a thousand deflecting tendencies of our personal life are out of the way. There our souls undoubtedly lie close to God from whom power and wisdom come in ways that are only limited by our conscious ability to assimilate and understand the result. For always there is help in the subconscious world. Never do we turn to it in vain.

We mistake if we think that it is the idea or experience which we try to coerce into our selfhood which becomes most truly our own. It is

*For further aspects of attention see Stout, "Analytic Psychology," i, 189. Stout carefully distinguishes mental attention from its physiological accompaniments. Hence it is made clearer that we are able to direct attention from within.