502 P8TCH0L0OT. 



start of surprise tliat runs tbrougli us if some one has 

 filled the light-seeming box with sand before we try to 

 lift it, or has substituted for the cannon-ball which we 

 know a painted wooden imitation? Surprise can only 

 come from getting a sensation which differs from the one 

 we expect. But the truth is that when we know the objects 

 well, the very slightest difference from the expected weight 

 will surjjrise us, or at least attract our notice. With un- 

 known objects we begin by expecting the weight made 

 probable by their appearance. The expectation of this 

 sensation innervates our lift, and we ' set ' it rather small 

 at first. An instant verifies whether it is too small. Our 

 expectation rises, i.e., we think in a twinkling of a setting 

 of the chest and teeth, a bracing of the back, and a more 

 violent feeling in the arms. Quicker than thought we have 

 them, and with them the burden ascends into the air.* 

 Bernhardt f has shown in a rough experimental way that 

 our estimation of the amount of a resistance is as delicately 

 graduated when our wills are passive, and our limbs made 

 to contract by direct local faradization, as when we our- 



* Cf. Souriau in Rev. Philosophique, xxii. 454. — Professor G. E 

 Milller thus describes some of his experiments with weights : If, after 

 lifting a weight of 3000 grams a number of times we suddenly get a weight 

 of only 500 grams to lift, " this latter weight is then lifted with a velocity 

 which strikes every onlooker, so that the receptacle for the weight with all 

 its contents often flies high up as if it carried the arm along with it, and 

 the energy with which it is raised is sometimes so entirely out of propor- 

 tion to the weight itself, that the contents of the receptacle are shiug out 

 upon the table in spite of the mechanical obstacles which such a result has 

 to overcome. A more palpable proof that the trouble here is a wrong adap- 

 tation of the motor impulse could not be given." Pflligers Archiv, xlv. 

 47. Compare also p. 57, and the quotation from He ring on the same 

 page. 



f Archiv ftlr Psychiatric, in. 618-635. Bernhardt strangely enough 

 seems to think that what his experiments disprove is the existence of affer- 

 ent muscular feelings, not those of efferent innervation— apparently because 

 he deems that the peculiar thrill of the electricity ought to overpower all 

 other afferent feelings from the part. But it is far more natural to inter- 

 pret his results the other way, even aside from the certainty yielded by 

 other evidence that passive muscular feelings exist. This other evidence, 

 after being compendiously summed up by Sachs in Reichert und Du 

 Bois' Archiv (1874), pp. 174-188, is, as far as the anatomical and physio- 

 logical grounds go, again thrown into doubt by Mays, Zeitschrift f . Bif> 

 logic, Bd. XX. 



