WILL. 497 



That knowledge would be superfluous complication. So in 

 acquiring any art or voluntary function. The marksman 

 ends by thinking only of the exact position of the goal, the 

 singer only of the perfect sound, the balancer only of the 

 point of the pole whose oscillations he must counteract. 

 The associated mechanism has become so perfect in all 

 these persons that each variation in the thought of the 

 end is functionally correlated with the one movement 

 fitted to bring the latter about. Whilst they were tyros, 

 they thought of their means as well as their end : the 

 marksman of the position of his gun or bow, or the weight 

 of his stone ; the pianist of the visible position of the note 

 on the keyboard ; the singer of his throat or breathing ; the 

 balancer of his feet on the rope, or his hand or chin under 

 the pole. But little by little they succeeded in dropping 

 all this supernumerary consciousness, and they became 

 secure in their movements exactly in proportion as they 

 did so. 



Now if we analyze the nervous mechanism of voluntary 

 action, we shall see that by virtue of this principle of jDar- 

 simony in consciousness the motor discharge ought to be 

 devoid of sentience. If we call the immediate psychic an- 

 tecedent of a movement the latter's mental cue, all that is 

 needed for invariability of sequence on the movement's 

 part is 2, fixed connection between each several mental cue, 

 and one particular movement. For a movement to be pro- 

 duced with perfect precision, it suffices that it obey in- 

 stantly its own mental cue and nothing else, and that this 

 mental cue be incapable of awakening any other movement. 

 Now the simplest possible arrangement for producing vol- 

 untary movements would be that the memory-images of 

 the movement's distinctive peripheral effects, whether resi- 

 dent or remote,* themselves should severally constitute the 

 mental cues, and that no other psychic facts should inter- 

 vene or be mixed up with them. For a million different 

 voluntary movements, we should then need a million dis- 



* Prof. Harless, in an article which in many respects forestalls what 1 

 have to say (Der Apparat des Willens, in Fichte's Zeitschrift f. Philos.. 

 Bd. 38, 1861), uses the convenient word Effectsbild to designate these 

 images. 



