THE FEELING OF EFFORT. 5 



a true insentiency in the motor cell, an insentiency which would accompany all action 

 there, and characterize its normal discharges as well as the unnatural irritations made 

 by the knife of the surgeon or the electrodes of the physiologist upon the motor nerve. 



Plausibility accrues to this presumption when we call to mind this general law : 

 that consciousness seems to desert all processes where it can no longer be of 

 any use. The tendency of coiasciousness to a minimum of complication is in fact 

 a dominating law in Psychology. The logical law of parsimony is only its best 

 known case. We grow unconscious of every feeling which is useless as a sign to 

 lead us to our ends, and where one sign will suflEice, others drop out, and that one 

 remains to function alone. We observe this in the whole history of sense perception, 

 and in the acquisition of every art. We ignore which eye we see with, because 

 a fixed mechanical association has been formed between our motions and each retinal 

 image. Our motions are the ends of our seeing, our retinal images the signals to 

 these ends. If each retinal image, whichever it be, can suggest automatically a 

 motion in the right direction, what need for us to know whether it be in the right 

 eye or the left ? The knowledge would be superfluous complication. So in acquiring 

 any art or voluntary function. The marksman thinks only of the exact position 

 of the goal, the singer only of the perfect sound, the balancer only of the point 

 in space whose oscillations he must counteract by movement. The associated 

 mechanism has become so perfect in all these persons, that each variation in the 

 thought of the end, is functionally correllated with the one movement fitted to bring 

 the latter about. Whilst they were tyros, they thought of their means as well as their 

 end ; the marksman of the position of his gun or bow, or the weight of his stone, 

 the pianist of the visible position of the note on the keyboard, the singer of his 

 throat or breathing, the balancer of his feet on the rope, or his hand or chin under 

 the pole. But little by little they succeeded in dropping all this supernumerary 

 consciousness, and they became secure in their movements exactly in proportion as they 

 did so. 



Now if we analyze the nervous mechanism of voluntary action, we shall see that 

 by virtue of this principle of parsunony in consciousness, the motor discharge ought 

 to be devoid of sentience. The essentials of a voluntary movement, are : 1, a preliminary 

 idea of the end we wish to attain ; 2, a '■^fiat ; " 3, an appropriate muscular contraction ; 

 4, the end felt as actually accomplished. In man, at any rate, it is admitted that the 

 idea of the end and the muscular contraction were originally coupled by empirical 

 association; that is to say, the child with his end in view, made random movements until he 

 accidentally found one to fit. This movement awakened its own characteristic feeling 

 which thenceforward remained with him as the idea of the movement appropriate to that 

 particular end. If the man should acquire a million distinct ends, he must acquire a 

 million such motor ideas and a million connections between them and the ends. 

 But one such connection, subserved by an exclusive nerve tract used for no other purpose, 

 will be enough for each end. The end conceived, wiU when these associations are formed, 

 always awaken its own proper motor idea. As for the manner in which this idea 

 awakens its own j)roper movement — the one which will convert it from an idea into an 

 actual sensation — the simplest possible arrangement would be to let it serve directly, 

 (through its peculiar neural process) as a stimulus to the special motor centre, the ultimate 

 sensible effect of whose discharge it prefigures and represents. 



