The reason we are not directly conscious of this force of our ideas is that one idea rarely has free play. A second idea starts before the first is well under way and more or less inhibits the first's action, thus complicating the problem. If motions generally were not complex, no science would be needed to unravel them.
So much for motor-ideas. But beside motor-ideas, there are other ideas not concerned with action at all, but with thoughts as such; ideo-ideas, we may call them. In James's matutinal experience, the idea of rising, instead of rousing him, roused first the idea of not doing so, by spontaneously calling up the consciousness of his cosiness, and this, doubtless, prompted the happy thought of a like snug inclosing of his last psychic find in some pithy phrase, and that brought up the subject of embalming generally, which reminded him that life was fleeting, whereupon it flashed upon him that he would better be up and doing, and up he got.
If thoughts did not thus run their own trains, we should be simple automata, void of memory, and incapable of reasoning; nature's puppets at sensation's string.
