30-2 PSYCHOLOGY. 



name, is really a feeling of bodily activities ichose exact nature 

 is by most men overlooked. 



Now, without pledging ourselves in any way to adopt this 

 hypothesis, let us dally with it for a while to see to what 

 consequences it might lead if it were true. 



In the first place, the nuclear j)art of the Self, inter- 

 mediary between ideas and overt acts, would be a collection 

 of activities j^hysiologically in no essential way different 

 from the overt acts themselves. If we divide all possible 

 physiological acts into adjustments and executions, the 

 nuclear self would be the adjustments collectively consid- 

 ered ; and the less intimate, more shifting self, so far aa 

 it was active, would be the executions. But both adjust- 

 ments and executions w^ould obey the refiex type. Both 

 would be the result of sensorial and ideational processes 

 discharging either into each other within the brain, or into 

 muscles and other parts outside. The peculiarity of the 

 adjustments would be that they are minimal reflexes, few 

 in number, incessantly repeated, constant amid great fluc- 

 tuations in the rest of the mind's content, and entirely 

 unimportant and uninteresting except through their uses 

 in furthering or inhibiting the presence of various things, 

 and actions before consciousness. These characters would 

 naturally keep us from introspectively jDaying much atten- 

 tion to them in detail, whilst they would at the same time 

 make us aware of them as a coherent group of processes, 

 strongly contrasted with all the other things consciousness 

 contained, — even with the other constituents of the ' Self,' 

 material, social, or spiritual, as the case might be. They 

 are reactions, and they are primary reactions. E^-erything 

 arouses them ; for objects which have no other effects 

 will for a moment contract the brow and make the glottis 

 close. It is as if all that visited the mind had to stand an 

 entrance-examination, and just show its face so as to be 

 either approved or sent back. These primary reactions 

 are like the opening or the closing of the door. In the 

 midst of psychic change they are the j)ermanent core 

 of turnings-towards and turnings-from, of yieldings and 

 arrests, which naturally seem central and interior in com- 



