Laws and Hypotheses for Behavior 261 



this page, and make the movement. It may seem at first 

 sight that having the idea entirely unopposed was the suffi- 

 cient cause of the act. But careful experiment, including, 

 for instance, the closure of the eyes and anesthesia of the 

 fingers will reveal that the original propulsion of the idea is 

 not to just that act, but to many possibilities, and that its 

 chief potency lies in the fact that not to get the finger to 

 that point is annoying, and that consequently the organism 

 is at peace only when the act is done. 



So far it has been shown that : The majority of responses 

 are not produced by ideas of them. The idea of a response 

 may be impotent to produce it. The idea of one act may 

 produce a different, even an opposite act. When an idea 

 seems to produce a response in and of itself, it may really act 

 by determining the satisfyingness of responses otherwise 

 made. These facts are sufficient to destroy the pretensions 

 of any general law that the image of an act will, other things 

 being equal, produce it. But the possibility that such an 

 image may occasionally exercise this peculiar potency re- 

 mains. 



I despair of convincing the reader that it does not. Man 

 is the only animal possessing a large fund of ideas of acts, 

 and man's connection-system is so complex and his ideas of 

 acts are so intricately bound to situations that have by 

 use and effect produced those acts, that the proof of this 

 negative is a practical impossibility. But it is possible to 

 show that even the most favored cases for the production 

 of a response by securing an ideal representation of it may 

 be explainable by use and effect alone. 



The extreme apparent potency of ideas representing acts 

 to produce them regardless of bonds of use or effect is, of 

 course, witnessed in the phenomena of suggestion in hyp- 

 nosis and allied states. To try to reduce these phenomena 



