514 PSYCHOLOGY. 



cannot, therefore, regard the observation of Prof. Mach as 

 any proof that the latter feelings exist.* 



The circumstantial evidence for the feeling of innervation 

 thus seems to break down like the introspective evidence. 

 But not only can we rebut experiments intended to prove 

 it, we can also adduce experiments which disprove it. A 

 person who moves a limb voluntarily must innervate it in 

 any case, and if he feels the innervation he ought to be able 

 to use the feeling to define what his limb is about, even 

 though the limb itself were anaesthetic. If, however, the 

 limb be totally anaesthetic, it turns out that he does not 

 know at all how much work it performs in its contraction — in 

 other words, he has no perception of the amount of inner- 

 vation which he exerts. A patient examined by Messrs. 

 Gley and Marillier beautifully showed this. His entire 

 arms, and his trunk down to the navel, were insensible both 

 superficially and deeply, but his arms were not paralyzed : 



' ' We take three stone bottles — two of them are empty and weigh 

 each 250 grams; the third is full of mercury and weighs 1850 grams. 

 We ask L ... to estimate their weight and tell us which is heaviest. 

 He declares that he finds them all three alike. With many days of in- 

 terval we made two series of six experiments each. The result was always 

 the same. The experiment, it need hardly be said, was arranged in 



* I owe the interpretation in the text to my friend and former student.Mr. 

 E. S, Drown, whom I set to observe the phenomenon before I bad observed 

 it myself. Concerning the vacillations in our interpretation of relative 

 motion over retina and skin, see above, p. 173. 



Herr Mtlnsterberg gives additional reasons against the feeling of in- 

 nervation, of which I will quote a couple. First, our ideas of movement are 

 ai\ faint ideas, resembling in this the copies of sensations in memory. Were 

 they feelings of the outgoing discharge, they would be original states of 

 consciousness, not copies; and ought by analogy to be vivid like other 

 original states. — Second, our unstriped muscles yield no feelings in con- 

 tracting, nor can they be contracted at will, differing thus in too peculiari- 

 ties from the voluntary muscles. What more natural than to suppose that 

 the two peculiarities hang together, and that the reason why we cannot con- 

 tract our intestines, for example, at will, is, that we have no memory-images 

 of how their contraction feels ? Were the supposed innervation-feeling al- 

 ways the 'mental cue,' one doesn't see why we might not have it even 

 where, as here, the contractions themselves are unfelt, and why it might 

 not bring the contractions about. (Die Willenshandlung, pp. 87-8.) 



