CHAP. XXVI.] VOLUNTARY MOVEMENTS. 553 



Actions, efforts are made to perform some new combina- 

 tions of movements, the complicacy of which renders them 

 at first very difficult to execute. This is the case, for 

 instance, when a child is learning to write, or when a 

 youth is learning to dance or to play upon some musical 

 instrument. In every such case, some Idea or Concep- 

 tion of the kind of Movement needed is to be recog- 

 nized as a more or less distinctly conscious component of 

 the ' Volition ' in question. 



When commencing a Voluntary Movement which we have often 

 previously executed, we initiate it with certain pre-determined 

 qualities almost intuitively given to it, and yet in the selection of 

 which we are evidently guided by past experience and education. 

 A simple case will illustrate this. I know that objects having 

 certain visual characters have usually given me certain impressions 

 of ' weight ' and ' resistance ' when I have previously handled 

 them ; and, therefore, this previous experience enables me, on seeing 

 such an object again and desiring to handle it, to conjure up a 

 ' conception ' of the Movement needed, which, though it may be 

 very indistinctly realized in Consciousness, enables me, in some 

 way, to give the Volitional Act its necessary qualifications. 



This power, partly instinctive and partly a result of individual 

 education, has been made the subject of much mystification. 

 Some ascribe it to a 'locomotor instinct,' pure and simple, and 

 thereby ignore the fact that it is a power the manifestation of 

 which is greatly regulated by individual education. Some appeal 

 with vague gravity to the intervention of what they term ' motor 

 intuitions ' meaning, thereby, something pertaining to, or having 

 their origin in, the Motor Centres about to be called into activity, 

 but which yet, beforehand, in some way help to determine the 

 mode of their own activity.* 



* There are, in all probability, in Motor Centres multitudes of 

 different combinations of cell-and-fibre connections which have 

 been gradually established, and through the agency of which Voli- 

 tional Incitations may be necessarily distributed along certain ' out- 

 going ' fibres, so as to call into activity in definite modes particu- 

 lar groups of Muscles. There seems no good reason, however, 



