WILL. 495 



this particular pair of terms should have grown into a uni- 

 form sequence. Meanwhile why any state of consciousness 

 at aU should precede a movement, we know not — the two 

 things seem so essentially discontinuous. But if a state of 

 consciousness there must be, why then it may, for aught 

 we can see, as easily be one sort of a state as another. It 

 is swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat for a man (all 

 of whose muscles will on certain occasions contract at a 

 sudden touch or sound) to suppose that on another occasion 

 the idea of the feelings about to be produced by their con- 

 traction is an insufficient mental signal for the latter^ and to 

 insist that an additional antecedent is needed in the shape 

 of *a feeling of the outgoing discharge.' 



No ! for aught we can see, and in the light of goneral 

 analogy, the kinsesthetic ideas, as we have defined them, or 

 images of incoming feelings of attitude and motion, are as 

 likely as any feelings of innervation are, to be the last 

 psychic antecedents and determiners of the various cur- 

 rents downwards into the muscles from the brain. The 

 question " What are the antecedents and determinants ?" is 

 a question of fact, to be decided by whatever empirical evi- 

 dence may be found.* 



* As the feeling of heat, for example, is the last psychic antecedent of 

 sweating, as the feeling of bright light is that of the pupil's contraction, as 

 the sight or smell of carrion is that of the movements of disgust, as the 

 remembrance of a blunder may be that of a blush, so the idea of a move- 

 ment's sensible effects might be that of the movement itself. It is true 

 that the idea of sweating will not commonly make us sweat, nor that of 

 blushing make us blush. But in certain nauseated states the idea of vom- 

 iting will make us vomit; and a kind of sequence which is in this case 

 realized only exceptional!}^ might be the rule with the so-called voluntary 

 muscles It all depends on the nervous connections between the centres 

 of ideation and the discharging paths. These may differ from one sort of 

 centre to another. They do differ somewhat from one individual to an- 

 other. Many persons never blush at the idea of their blunders, but only 

 "When the actual blunder is committed; others blush at the idea; and somo 

 do not blush at all. According to Lotze, with some persons " It is possible 

 to weep at will by trying to recall that peculiar feeling in the trigeminal 

 nerve which habitually precedes tears. Some can even succeed in sweating 

 voluntarily, by the lively recollection of the characteristic skin -sensations, 

 and the voluntary reproduction of an indescribable sort of feeling of relax- 

 ation, which ordinarily precedes the flow of perspiration." (Med. Psych., 

 p. 303.) The commoner type of exceptional case is that in which the idea 

 of the stimulus, not that of the effects, provokes the effects. Thus w 



