DETERMINISM AND SELF-DIRECTION. 6i 



means for voluntary action, having especial importance. 

 Mr. J. S. Mill was so much impressed with the value of 

 the principles thus indicated that he wrote to congratulate 

 the author on an — 



additional step in advance in the most important inquiry in 

 all physiology, viz, that most directly connected with psychology. 

 I have long looked to you (he added) as the great living guide 

 in this advancing speculation, both by your own speculative 

 powers, and by the clearness and philosophical discrimination 

 with which you conceive and judge the results arrived at by 

 others. 



The general view of the distinction between automatic 

 and volitional action at which Dr. Carpenter had now 

 arrived, was completed by the proof of the reflex activity 

 of the brain, which had been first suggested by Dr. Laycock. 

 The peculiar phenomena known under the name of Electro- 

 Biology, which then attracted so much public attention, 

 afforded Dr. Carpenter many opportunities of testing his 

 conclusions ; and in a lecture delivered at the Royal 

 Institution, in March, 1852, " On the Influence of Suggestion 

 in modifying and directing Muscular Movement, inde- 

 pendently of Volition," he expounded the connection which 

 he believed to subsist between the different modes of action 

 of the nervous system.* The power of ideas to produce 

 respondent movements through the instrumentality of the 

 cerebrum was illustrated by the states of electro-biology 

 and somnambulism, when the controlling power of the 

 will was suspended. The ideo-motor principle of action 

 being thus established at the head of the physiological 

 scale, it was easily applied to many of the phenomena ot 

 mesmerism and spiritualism, which depended on the state 

 of expectant attention. In this condition the abstraction of 

 the mind laid the will to rest, and the anticipation of a 

 * See the extracts from the Report below, p. 169. 



