20 WILLIAM JAMES ON 



both cases, it is as true and good willing as it was when I willed to write. In a word, 

 volition is a psychic or moral fact pure and simple, and is absolutely completed when 

 the intention or consent is there. The supervention of motion upon its completion is a 

 supernumerary phenomenon belonging to the department of physiology exclusively, and 

 dejDending on the organic structure and condition of executive ganglia, whose functioning 

 is quite unconscious. 



In St. Vitus' dance, in locomotor ataxy, the representation of a movement and the 

 consent to it take place normally. But the inferior executive centres are deranged, 

 and although the ideas discharge them, they do not discharge them so as to reproduce 

 the precise sensations which they prefigure. In aphasia the patient has an image of 

 certain words which he wishes to utter, but when he opens his mouth, he hears himself 

 making quite unintended sounds. This may fill him with rage and despair — which 

 passions only show how intact his will remains.^ 



Paralysis only goes a step farther. The associative mechanism is not only deranged 

 but altogether broken through. The volition occurs, but the hand remains as still as the 

 table. The paralytic is made aware of this by the absence of the expected change in his 

 afferent sensations. He tries harder, i. e., he mentally frames the sensation of muscular 

 " effort" with consent that it shall occur. It does so : he frowns, he heaves his chest, he 

 clenches his other fist, but the palsied arm lies passive.^ It may then be that the thought 

 of his impotence shall make his will, like a Earey-tamed horse, forever afterwards cowed, 

 inhibited, imjjossible, with respect to that particular motion.^ 



The special case of the limb being completely anaesthetic, as well as atactic, curiously 

 illustrates the merely external and quasi-accidental connection between muscular motion 

 and the thought which instigates it. We read of cases like this : 



" Voluntary movements cannot be estimated the moment the patient ceases to take note 

 of them by his eyes. Thus after having made him close his eyes, if one asks him to 

 move one of his Innbs either wholly or in part, he does it but cannot tell whether the 

 effected movement is large or small, strong or weak, or even if it has taken place at all. 

 And when he opens his eyes after moving his leg from right to left, for example, he 

 declares that he had a very inexact notion of the extent of the effected movement. . . . 

 If, having the intention of executing a certain movement, I j^revent him, he does not jDer- 

 ceive it, and supposes the limb to have taken the position he intended to give it."* Or 

 this: 



1 In ataxy it is true that the sensations resultant from a state. The undoubtedly true theory is best expounded by 



movement are usually disguised by anasthesia. This has led Jaccoud: Des Paraplegies et de I'Ataxie Motrice, 1864, 



to false explanations of the symptom (Leyden, Die graue part iii, chapter ii. 



Degeneration des Riickenmarks, 1863). But the undeni- ^ A normal palsy occurs during sleep. We will all sorts 



able existence of atactics without a trace of insensibility of motions in our dreams, but seldom perform any of them, 



proves the trouble to be due to disorder of the associating In nightmare we become conscious of the non-performance, 



machinery between the centres of ideation and those of dis- and will the " effort." This seems then to occur in a 



charge. These latter cases have been used by some authors restricted way, limiting itself to the occlusion of the glottis 



in support of the Innervationsgetxihl theory: (Classen: das and producing the respiratory anxiety which wakes us up. 



Schlussverfahren des Sehaotes, 1863, p. 50); the spas- ^ Vide supra, p. S, note 3. 



modic irregular movements being interpreted as the result of * Landry: Memoire sur la Paralysie du Sens Musculaire, 



an imperfect sense of the amount of innervation we are in Gazette des Hopitaux, 1855, p. 270. 

 exerting. There is no subjective evidence whatever of such 



