WILL. 499 



The presumption being thus against the feelings of in- 

 nervation, those who defend their existence are bound to 

 prove it by positive evidence. The evidence might be di- 

 rect or indirect. If we could introspectively feel them as 

 something plainly distinct from the perijoheral feelings and 

 ideas of movement which nobody denies to be there, that 

 would be evidence both direct and conclusive. Unfor- 

 tunately it does not exist. 



There is no introspective evidence of the feeling of innerva- 

 tion. Wherever we look for it and think we have grasped 

 it, we find that we have really got a peripheral feeling or 

 image instead — an image of the way in which we feel when 

 the innervation is over, and the movement is in process of 

 doing or is done. Our idea of raising our arm, for example, 

 or of crooking our finger, is a sense, more or less vivid, of 

 how the raised arm or the crooked finger feels. There is 

 no other mental material out of which such an idea might 

 be made. We cannot possibly have any idea of our ears' 

 motion until our ears have moved ; and this is true of every 

 other organ as well. 



Since the time of Hume it has been a commonplace in 

 psychology that we are only conversant with the outward 

 results of our volition, and not with the hidden inner 

 machinery of nerves and muscles which are what it prima- 

 rily sets at work.* The believers in the feeling of inner- 

 vation readily admit this, but seem hardly alive to its con- 

 sequences. It seems to me that one immediate conse- 

 quence ought to be to make us doubt the existence of the 

 feeling in disi3ute. Whoever sa3's that in raising his arm 

 he is ignorant of hoAv many muscles he contracts, in what 

 order of sequence, and in what degrees of , intensity, ex- 

 pressively avows a colossal amount of unconsciousness of 

 the processes of motor discharge. Each separate muscle 

 at any rate cannot have its distinct feeling of innervation. 

 Wundt;t who makes such enormous use of these hypo- 



* The best modern statemeut I know is by Jaccoud: Des Paraplegics et 

 de I'Ataxie du Mouvemeut (Paris, 1864), p. 591. 



f Leidesdorf u. Meynert's Viertel jsch. f . Psychiatric, Bd. i. Heft i. S. 

 36-7 (1867). Physiologische Psychologic, 1st ed. S. 316. 



