24 WILLIAM JAMES ON 



insane, but they are too pressing to be withstood. Again and again sober notions come, 

 but like the sober instants of a drunken man, they are so sickeningly cadaverous, or 

 else so still and small and imperceptible, that the lunatic can't bear to look them fully in 

 the face and say: "let these alone represent my realities." Such an extract as this will 

 illustrate what I mean : 



"A gentleman of respectable birth, excellent education, and ample fortune, engaged in 

 one of the highest depai'tments of trade .... and being induced to embark in one of 

 the plausible speculations of the day .... was utterly ruined. Like other men he could 

 bear a sudden overwhelming reverse better than a long succession of petty misfortunes, 

 and the way in which he conducted himself on the occasion met with unbounded admi- 

 ration from his friends. He withdrew, however, into rigid seclusion, and being no longer 

 able to exercise the generosity and indulge the benevolent feelings which had formed the 

 happiness of his life, made himself a substitute for them by daydreams, gradually fell into 

 a state of irritable despondency, from which he only gradually recovered with the loss of 

 reason. He now fancied himself possessed of immense wealth, and gave without stint his 

 imaginary riches. He has ever since been under gentle restraint, and leads a life not 

 merely of happiness, but of bliss ; converses rationally, reads the newspapers, where every 

 tale of distress attracts his notice, and being furnished witli an abundant supply of blank 

 checks, he fills up one of them with a munificent sum, sends it off to the sufferer, and 

 sits down to his dinner with a happy conviction that he has earned the right to a little 

 indulgence in the pleasures of the table ; and yet, on a serious conversation with one of 

 his old friends, he is quite conscious of his real position, but the conviction is so exquis- 

 itely painful that he will not let himself believe it."^ 



Now to turn to the special case of the decision to make a muscular movement. This 

 decision may require a volitional effort, or it may not. If I am well, and the move- 

 rpent is a light one (like the brushing of dust from my coat-sleeve), and suggests no 

 consequences of an unpleasant nature, it is effortless. But if unpleasant consequences 

 are expected, that effective sustaining of the idea which results in bringing the motion 

 about, and which is equivalent to mental consent that those consequences become real, 

 involves considerable effort of volition. Now the unpleasant consequences may be 

 immediate — , my body may be weary, or the movement violent, and involve a great 

 amount of that general and special afferent feeling which we learned above to constitute 

 muscular exertion. Under these circumstances the idea of the movement is the 

 imagination of these massively unpleasant feelings, and nothing else. The willing of the 

 movement is the consent to these imagined feelings becoming real, — the saying of them, 

 "Jiant." The effort which the willing requires is the purely mental transition from the 

 mere conception of the feelings to their expectation, steadfastly maintaining itself before 

 the miud, disagreeable though it be. The motor idea, assuming at last this victorious 

 status, not only uninhibited by remote associations, but inhibited no longer even by its 

 own unpleasantness, discharges by the preappointed mechanism into the right muscles. 

 Then the motor sensations accrue in all their expected severity, the and muscular effort 

 as distinguished from tte volitional effort has its birth. 



1 The Duality of the Mind, by A. L. Wigan, M. D., p. 123. 



