254 THE PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY 



entirely under its control, can never cease to be volitional ; 

 and that either an infinitesimally small amount of Will is 

 required to maintain them when they have been once set 

 going, or that the Will is a sort of pendulum-like oscillation 

 between two actions, the maintenance of the train of thought, 

 and the maintenance of the train of movement. But if only 

 an infinitesimally small amount of Will is necessary to main- 

 tain them, is not that 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 such an 

 action would go on of itself ; so that its essentially automatic 

 character is virtually admitted. The physiological explana- 

 tion, that the Mechanism of Locomotion, as of other habitual 

 movements, grows to the mode in which it is early exercised, 

 and that it then works automatically under the general 

 control and direction of the Will, can scarcely be put down 

 by the assumption of a hypothetical necessity, which rests 

 only on the basis of ignorance of our composite nature." 1 



416. Dr. Carpenter, however, has not exhausted the whole 

 of the possibilities. 2 The real gist of the question whether, or 

 not, automatic actions are voluntary, lies in the further 

 question whether our attention ever completely wanders from 

 an automatic action while we are doing it. Judging from 

 my own mental experience it appears to me that it never 

 does so wander. At the present moment I am looking at a 

 point of light reflected from a gilded knob. My attention is 

 concentrated on it, but not the whole of my attention. I am 

 conscious also, though much more vaguely, of the rest of the 

 knob, of the piece of furniture to which it belongs, of the 

 wall against which it rests, of all the objects in the room 



1 Mental Physiology, pp. 19, 20. 



2 " There is more than one alternative explanation in accordance with 

 larger bodies of facts. One is that the perceptions and volitions in 

 habitual actions may be performed consciously, only so quickly and 

 inattentively that no memory of them remains. Another is that the 

 consciousness of these actions exists, but is split off from the conscious- 

 ness of the rest of the hemispheres. We shall find in Chapter X. 

 numerous proofs of this split-off condition of portions of the conscious- 

 ness. Since in man the hemispheres indubitably co-operate in the 

 secondary automatic acts, it will not do to say either that they occur 

 without consciousness or that their consciousness is that of the lower 

 centres, which we know nothing about. But either lack of memory or 

 split-off cortical consciousness will certainly account for all the facts " 

 (James' Principles of Psychology, vol. i., p. 165.) 



