Tke Emotions. 773 



and often of the most exquisite pleasure. They could never become 

 pursuits if it were not so. The organs involved with these, like others, 

 are liable to excessive development and morbid stimulation, and the 

 subject becomes a hobbyist, a crank, or a lunatic. 



From the forgoing it is obvious that, as remarked at the beginning, 

 there is no natural separation of the emotional from the intellectual, 

 either in organs or their active expressions. Every organ in the cere- 

 brum possessed of a memory is an intellectual organ. It is likewise emo- 

 tional in the degree in which its recollection is also sensation. The 

 sensation is pleasurable or painful in the ratio of the harmony, or inhar- 

 mon} T , with which the action is connected, with so much of our personal- 

 ity as may have been already developed. Therefore, no matter in how de- 

 liberate and well considered a manner a determination or will is arrived 

 at, sensations, that is, emotions, have constituted its motives. If an act be 

 performed under the excitement of a powerful and sudden sensory stim- 

 ulation which proceeds to rapid execution, but little time is left for the 

 interference of many of those organs in the cerebrum whose constitution 

 would ordinarily cause them to participate in the action. We often 

 speak of such an action as involuntary. But the simple fact of its be- 

 ing done rapidly does not make it so. It maj* not be well considered, 

 and be different from what it would have been if it had been well con- 

 sidered and modified by all the related organs ; but hardly any volun- 

 tary action is the result of a will formed under the influence of all the 

 possibly related ideas in the cerebrum. Generally but a few and often 

 only one idea is the motive of a will. The will is formed by whatever 

 stimuli happen to be present and active, and those potential ones which 

 remain dormant in the background, of which there is in every case a 

 large number, though not the same in any two cases, have nothing to do 

 with it. When one motive is dominant, one motive is sufficient to form 

 a will, and that it may be overwhelmingly so, does not make the will 

 formed any less a will. Whatever is prompted by grief, hatred, malice 

 anger, revenge, fear, hope, caution, benevolence, malevolence, patrio- 

 tism, humor, defense, indignation, love, policy, is voluntary. Whether 

 11 ic will be formed suddenly or deliberately by one or more of these 

 motives, it is still a will, and the stimulation arising from its formation 

 takes the same track down the efferent nerves from the cerebrum. Prob- 

 ably the reason why it has ever seemed proper to make the distinction 

 of voluntary and involuntary between acts prompted by deliberate emo- 

 tional stimuli and the same stimuli* when sudden, has arisen from the 

 collision of the notion of free agency as thought to be illustrated in the 

 former, and the fact of necessity as plainly shown in the latter. When 

 it is understood that the so-called voluntary acts are just as necessary as 

 the others, this distinction will disappear. 



