An act of will—which one?—in a video clip

Eureka. For many years in my classes as I would describe the complex series of acts of the will in Thomas's teaching, I would recall a TV commercial that I saw in the mid-1990's that always seemed to me "to nail it" when it came to putting on visual display one such act of will. The problem was that all I had was my memory of the clip plus my ability to retell its story. The years passed by and other things filled my world.

But the other day, partly out of frustration regarding how poorly understood is Thomas's teaching on acts of will, and the specification of acts, I decided that I had to go find that clip. The clip was, I reminded myself, about a man and his son in a toy store, and it ultimately involved a full-sized Jeep Cherokee. Wrong. It was some Toyota SUV. Wrong again. Finally I phrased the search well enough to get a hit that lead me to that ad, only the SUV was an Isuzu Rodeo. Here it is:

So, enough of the history of the clip. The real question is: what act of will is this, and why do you think so? Comment below.

Mark Johnson
Mark Johnson is an associate professor of Theology at Marquette University, and founded thomistica.net on Squarespace in November of 2004. He studied with James Weisheipl, Leonard Boyle, Walter Principe, and Lawrence Dewan, at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (Toronto, Canada).
http://markfjohnson.org
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