118 PSYCHOLOGY. 



even tliis, the}" can only be centripetal nerve-currents, not 

 sufficient to arouse feeling, but sufficient to arouse motor 

 resj)onse.* It may be at once admitted that they are not 

 distinct i?o////on,§. The will, if any will be present, limits 

 itself to a permission that they exert their motor effects. 

 Dr. Carpenter writes : 



"There may still be metaphysicians who maintain that actions 

 which were originally prompted by the will with a distinct intention, 

 and which are still entirely under its control, can never cease to be 

 volitional; and that either an infinitesimally small amount of will is 

 requii'ed to sustain them when they have been once set going, or that 

 the will is in a sort of pendulum-like oscillation between the two actions 

 — the maintenance of the train of thought, and the maintenance of the 

 train of mocement. But if only an infinitesimally small amount of will 

 is necessary to sustain them, is not this tantamount to saying that they 

 go on by a force of their own? And does not the experience of the 

 perfect continuitij of our train 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 each action goes 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 move- 

 ments, 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 any assumption of an hypothetical neces- 

 sity, which rests only on the basis of ignorance of one side of our com- 

 posite nature." t 



But if not distinct acts of will, these immediate ante- 

 cedents of each movement of the chain are at any rate 

 accompanied by consciousness of some kind. They are 

 sensations to which we are usually inattentive, but which im- 

 mediately call our attention if they go ivrong. Schneider's 

 account of these sensations deserves to be quoted. In the 

 act of walking, he says, even when our attention is entirely 

 off, 



"we are continuously aware of certain muscular feelings; and we 

 have, moreover, a feeling of certain impulses to keep our equilibrium 

 and to set down one leg after another. It is doubtful whether we could 

 preserve equilibrium if no sensation of our body's attitude were there, 



* Von Hartmann devotes a chapter of his ' Philosophy of the Uncon- 

 scious ' (English translation, vol. i. p. 72) to proving that they must be 

 both ideas and unconscious. 



f 'Mental Physiology,' p. 20. 



