660 WILL AND 



degrees of complexity. It is probably because these several cell- 

 and-fibre mechanisms are so perfect in their arrangement, that 

 each one of the Movements in question is capable of being evoked 

 ■with machine-like regularity in response to appropriate stimuli 

 im-pinging upon and passing through them.* 



The ' mechanisms ' for the production of many of such Movements 

 may have been originally developed far back in the history of our 

 race or of antecedent races. But others of them — those, for in- 

 stance, which are concerned in the acts of Deglutition — however 

 much they may have been from time to time modified in detail, 

 must have been originally organized in creatures the combination 

 of whose vague efforts and desires would scarcely be considered to 

 produce anything like what we know as 'Volition.' In all prob- 

 ability such feelings and the power of concentrating Attention, 

 which is their indispensable correlative, only gradually attain to 

 the degree of precision and intensity of which we, as human beings, 

 are conscious. This would probably be conceded by all, and if so 

 it must be concluded that the organic nervous bases of many of 

 the Primary Automatic Movements of higher animals have had 

 their orig-in, or have come into being, independently of anything 

 like such an agency as that which we know as 'Volition.' 



Thus, the further back we go in the animal series, the more 

 vague, in all probability, would be the influences prompting to new 

 developments of Nerve Tissue which could be ranged under the ' Vo- 

 litional ' type, and the more we should be compelled, if we strive to 

 learn the causes of such new developments, to fall back upon those 

 obscure hut, nevertheless, 'potent oric/mal tendencies or conditions, 

 tinder the influence of which the first rudimentary Nerve Elements 

 hecame developed in the tissues of loiver Organisms (p. 19). 



This mere organic nisus, or set of vital conditions, favouring the 

 first differentiation of Nervous Tissues, would probably continue to 

 act as the most potent influence governing all future phases of 

 their development — though it seems evident that such develop- 

 mental proclivities, even in the Spinal Cord, are capable of being 

 favoured in some mysterious manner by Cerebral Influence when 

 ' Volition ' is strongly exercised — that is when a sensorially active 

 Brain is dominated in such ways as to be productive of certain 



* That Hartley (1748) distinctly realized and foresaw the nature 

 of what we now term * Keflex Actions,' seems evident from a paa- 

 eage in his ** Observations on Man," Prop.-xviii. 



