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self with repeating this curious experiment. Though thirty years have 

 elapsed since the time I was writing, and though I have scarcely once 

 touched my balls during that period, I can still manage to read with 

 ease while keeping three balls up' " (Autobiography, p. 26).* 



We have called a, b, c, d, e, f, the antecedents of the successive 

 muscular attractions, by the name of sensations. Some authors seem 

 inclined to deny that they are even this. If not even this, they can 

 only be centripetal nerve-currents, not sufficient to arouse feeling, but 

 sufficient to arouse motor response.f It may be at once admitted that 

 tbey are not distinct volitions. The will, if any will be present, limits 

 itself to a permission that they exert their motor effects. Dr. Car- 

 penter writes : " There may still be metaphysicians who maintain that 

 actions which w T ere originally prompted by the will with a distinct in- 

 tention, and which are still entirely under its control, can never cease 

 to be volitional ; and that either an infinitesimally small amount of 

 will is required to sustain them when they have been once set going, 

 or that the will is in a sort of pendulum-like oscillation between the 

 two actions — the maintenance of the train of thought, and the mainte- 

 nance of the train of movement. But if only an infinitesimally small 

 amount of will is necessary to sustain them, is not this tantamount to 

 saying that they go on by a force of their own? And does not the 

 experience of the perfect continuity of our trains of thought during 

 the performance of movements that have become habitual, entirely 

 negative the hypothesis of oscillation ? Besides, if such an oscillation 

 existed, there must be intervals in which each action goes on ^f itself ; 

 so that its essentially automatic character is virtually admitted. The 

 physiological explanation, that the mechanism of locomotion, as of 

 other habitual movements, grows to the mode in which it is early ex- 

 ercised, and that it then works automatically under the general control 

 and direction of the will, can scarcely be put down by any assumption 

 of an hypothetical necessity, which rests only on the basis of ignorance 

 of one side of our composite nature." \ 



But if not distinct acts of will, these immediate antecedents of each 

 movement of the chain are at any rate accompanied by consciousness 

 of some kind. They are sensations to which we are usually inattentive, 

 but which immediately call our attention if they go wrong. Schneider's 

 account of these sensations deserves to be quoted. In the act of walk- 

 ing, he says, even when our attention is entirely off, " we are con- 

 tinuously aw r are of certain muscular feelings ; and we have, moreover, 

 a feeling of certain impulses to keep our equilibrium and to set down 

 one leg after another. It is doubtful whether we could preserve equi- 

 librium if no sensation of our body's attitude were there, and doubtful 



* Carpenter's " Mental Physiology," 1874, pp. 217, 218. 



f Yon Hartmann devotes a chapter of his " Philosophy of the Unconscious " (English 

 translation, vol. i, p. 72) to proving that they must be both ideas and unconscious. 

 \ " Mental Physiology," p. 20. 



