SUGGESTIVE CASE OF NERVE-ANASTOMOSIS. 327 



are controlled normally by the facial nerve. To read the face is to 

 read the soul, so far as the latter can express itself, or repress its ex- 

 pression, in any physical way. The whole history of this case reverses 

 the normal history of the original development. Instead of the power of 

 control being more and more acquired by experience of muscular and 

 tactual sensations, and of the results produced by the external or emo- 

 tional stimulation of these sensations, we have the increasing effect of 

 the deliberate and persistent voluntary attempt to regain control, with 

 its advancing degrees of success and increased differentiation; and last 

 of all, and most imperfectly, the resumption of non-volitional motor 

 functions under the stimulation of sensation and emotion. All this 

 certainly looks like the picture of a mind learning how to use a tool, 

 the construction of which has been suddenly so changed as to render it, 

 for the time being, substantially a different tool. This, so far as the 

 cerebral functions are concerned. The transmission of the motor im- 

 pulses, when once started from the cortical centers, by new and un- 

 accustomed tracts, is an affair of comparatively little significance either 

 to physiology or to psychology. 



In this psycho-physical progress, which I will call the evolution of 

 a more highly differentiated self-control, all the various familiar forms 

 of functioning, and laws of functioning, when seen from the psycho- 

 logical point of view, are apparent. The ease and ability increase with 

 practise; the motor results are in a measure cumulative; the different 

 forms of sensation-experiences inhibit or supplement and assist each 

 other; and the effects of fatigue make themselves manifest. Such an 

 evolution does not, however, seem explicable as nothing more than an 

 increasing complexity, ease and precision of sensory-motor reflexes; 

 although it has all the marks of dependence upon such a mechanical 

 basis. To speak figuratively, what takes place in such cases of nerve 

 anastomosis can not be completely and satisfactorily explained in terms 

 that are applicable to a nervous mechanism, however complex, or com- 

 plexly and mysteriously subject to improvements of a mechanical sort. 

 An agency, that must be described in terms of ideation, apperception 

 of an end to be attained, and purposeful volition consciously directed 

 toward that end, seems also necessary to account for the whole result. 

 If involuntary emotion and externally originated sensory-stimuli were 

 ihe means of evoking and educating the motor organism, in the first 

 instance; it is, on the other hand, conscious and purposeful voluntary 

 effort which is the most important factor in the recovery of function 

 and new education of the motor organism. And how astonishingly 

 complex and even antecedently improbable, we might almost say, are 

 the resulting histological and functional changes in the organism 

 brought about by repeated volitions, our conjectural analysis of this case 

 has suggested, if it has not made clear. 



