HABIT FORMATION AND FEELING QUALITIES 315 



hinders the progress of the latter even though the plan itself 

 has dropped out of consciousness. The explanation of how ei- 

 ther the facilitating or inhibiting effect is accomplished doubt- 

 less grounds on the nature of the operation or responses of the 

 nervous mechanism involved. Here, however, the interest cen- 

 ters in the effect of the feeling tone aroused by the conflicting 

 cognitive processes on the immediately subsequent movement. 

 The evidence points unmistakably to an adverse influence of 

 the feeling tone excited by the suit substitution on the move- 

 ment in question. I see no other explanation for the decidedly 

 high percentages of U ( ) reports of movements accompanied 

 by substitution. The introspective evidence of the feeling tone 

 aroused by the substitution process is clear enough while the 

 learning of the plan was on the conscious plane, but the subjects 

 do not report that it consciously affected the movement and there 

 is no apparent reason why it should. It was only after the plan 

 had become unconscious and the essential movements were be- 

 ing mechanized that the affective relation between suit substi- 

 tution and movement was discovered. But we are not yet in a 

 position to say whether or not the feeling tone thus fused with 

 the kinaesthesis favored or hindered its integrating into a skil- 

 ful act. 



The causes for the strictly motor inhibitions have been an- 

 ticipated in the discussion of critical movements (learning curve) 

 and of difficult movements (feeling tone excited by the distribu- 

 tion process). In the former case it was seen that the inhibit- 

 ing tendency of two divergent movements was inversely as the 

 size of the diverging angle. The feeling tone here involved was 

 a menace to high speed and perhaps to learning, but it was the 

 effect, in the beginning at least, and not the cause of the conflict 

 between the kinaestheses of the two movements, and besides 

 the feeling did not grow out -of the movement per se. But in 

 the latter, the difficult movements, the kinaestheses were accom- 

 panied by feeling qualities which proved a handicap to their readi- 

 ness of habit forming. If we assume that the better learned 

 movement sare the more accurate (fewest errors), the more rapid 

 (the least hold ups) and the better controlled (fewest dropped 



