WILL. 491 



executed, so also, where tlie chain is voluntary, we need to 

 know at each movement just ivliere ive are in it, if we are to 

 will intelligently what the next link shall be. A man with 

 no feeling of his movements might lead off never so well, 

 and yet be sure to get lost soon and go astray.* But 

 patients like those described, who get no kina3sthetic 

 impressions, can still be guided by the sense of sight 

 Thus Striimpell says of his boy : 



"One could always observe how his eye was directed first to the 

 object held before him, then to his own arm; and how it never ceased 



* In reality the movement cannot even be started correctly in some 

 cases without the liiuaesthetic impression. Thus Dr. Striimpell relates 

 how turning over the boy's hand made him bend the little finger instead of 

 the forefinger, when his eye was closed. " Ordered to point, e.g., towards 

 the left with his left arm , the arm was usually raised straight forward, and 

 then wandered about in groping uncertainty, sometimes getting the right 

 position and then leaving it again. Similarly with the lower limbs. If the 

 patient, lying in bed, had, immediately after the tying of his eyes, to lay 

 the left leg over the right, it often happened that he moved it farther over 

 towards the left, and that it lay over the side of the bed in apparently 

 the most intolerably-uncomfortable position. The turning of the head, 

 too, from right to left, or towards certain objects known to the patient, only 

 ensued correctly when the patient, immediately before his eye was bandaged, 

 specially refreshed his perception as to what the required movement was 

 to be." In another anaesthetic of Dr. Strumpell's (described in the same 

 essay) the arm could not be moved at all unless the eyes were opened, 

 however energetic the volition. The variations in these hysteric cases are 

 great. Some patients cannot move the anoesthetic part at all when the eyes 

 are closed. Others move it perfectly well, and can even write continuous 

 sentences with the anassthetic hand. The causes of such differences are as 

 yet incompletely unexplored. M. Binet suggests (Revue Philosophique, 

 XXV. 478) that in those who cannot move the hand at all the sensation of 

 light is required as a 'dynamogenic ' agent (see above, p. 377); and that in 

 those who can move it skilfully the anaesthesia is only a pseudo-insensi- 

 bility and that the limb is in reality governed by a dissociated or secondary 

 consciousness. This latter e.\plauatlon is certainly correct. Professor 

 G. E. Miiller (Pflliger's Arcbiv, xlv. 90) invokes the fact of individual 

 differences of imagination to account for the cases who cannot write at all. 

 Their kinsesthetic images properly so called may be weak, he says, and 

 their optical images insufficiently pow^erful to supplement them without a 

 ' fillip ' from sensation. Janet's observation that hysteric ansesthesias may 

 carry amnesias with them would jierfectly legitimate Milller's supposition. 

 What we now want is a minute examination of the individual cases. 

 Meanwhile liinet's article above referred to, and Bastian's paper in Brain 

 for April 1887, contain important discussions of the question. In a later 

 note I shall return to the subject again (see p. 520). 



