662 Sir James Crichton-Browne [May 27, 



A great many emotional movements are involuntary, and hence 

 they have often been referred to nerve centres lower than the cerebral 

 hemispheres, but it is to be borne in mind that many emotional acts 

 are also ideo-motor— that is to say there is a mental representation 

 of the act to be performed before it is performed, and ideo-motor 

 acts or movements can have no other origin than in the cerebral 

 hemispheres— the seat of consciousness. And it is further to be 

 borne in mind that a large number of motor acts which have become 

 involuntary by repetition and habit, were at first voluntary, purposely 

 devised or imitative, and as they must then have originated in the 

 highest cerebral centres, it is exceedingly improbable that they have 

 since been transferred to centres at lower levels. 



Expression, in its widest sense, is the manifestation of mental by 

 bodily conditions, and includes, as I have already said, language as 

 well as emotional movements. Language or speech— a peculiarly 

 human function, the last to evolve in the animal scale — consists in 

 certain muscular movements which at first thought we would^ regard 

 as altogether voluntary, but amongst which we see going on just the 

 same process that we have referred to as so much more marked 

 amongst emotional movements, the conversion of the voluntary into 

 the involuntary and automatic. Each of us has by incessant repeti- 

 tions of certain common words and phrases, such as salutations and 

 exclamations of various kinds, made them so automatic that they 

 blurt forth when required without any voluntary effort, and continue 

 to be uttered when through disease of the brain voluntary speech has 



It is 'agreed that language or speech is localised in the third 

 frontal convolution of the human brain which lies just at the front 

 of the motor area, and that its voluntary and involuntary expressions 

 alike have here their origin ; and it is fair to infer that the simpler 

 language of feature and gesture has also both its voluntary and 

 involuntary utterances localised in the region where the former must 

 unquestionably be placed. . 



I regard the central region of the brain as a great expressional 

 area whence proceed all the movements of the body that are an index 

 to conditions of the mind. In this region is placed the intricate 

 and delicate machinery by which emotional movements are produced, 

 and here we must study that action of the nervous system to which 

 Darwin gave a subsidiary, but to which I would give a first place m 

 the explanation of emotional expression. 



Every emotion, as has been explained, radiates throughout the 

 organism to its utmost confines. We must each of us have expe- 

 rienced the widespread diffusion of emotional disturbance in that 

 general tremor or shiver which runs down the backbone and along 

 the limbs, under a strong feeling of indignation or alarm ; but, besides 

 this general discharge, there are special channels of overflow of 

 emotional disturbance appropriate to each emotion. The motor 

 impulses expressive of each emotion start, as it were, from one centre 



