WILL. 515 



such wise that he could be informed neither by sight nor by hearing. 

 He even declared, holding in his hand the bottleful of mercury, that 

 he found it to have no weight. ... We place successively in his hand 

 (his eyes being still bandaged) a piece of modelling wax, a stick of hard 

 wood, a thick India-rubber tube, a newspaper folded up lengthwise and 

 rumpled, and we make him squeeze these several objects. He feels no 

 difference of resistance and does not even perceive that anything is in 

 his hand." * 



M. Gley in another place f quotes experiments by Dr. 

 Block wliicli prove that the sense which we have of our 

 limbs' position owes absolutely nothing to the feeling of in- 

 nervation put forth. Dr. Bloch stood opposite the angle of 

 a screen whose sides made an angle of about 90°, and tried 

 to place his hands symmetrically, or so that both should 

 fall on corresponding spots of the two screen-sides, which 

 were marked with squares for the purpose. The average 

 error being noted, one hand was then passively carried by 

 an assistant to a spot on its screen-side, and the other 

 actively sought the corresponding spot on the opposite 

 side. The accuracy of the correspondence proved to be 

 as great as when both arms were innervated voluntarily, 

 showing that the consciousness of innervation in the first 

 of the two experiments added nothing to the sense of the 

 limbs' position. Dr. Bloch then tried, pressing a certain 

 number of pages of a book between the thumb and fore- 

 finger of one hand, to press an equal number between the 

 same fingers of the other hand. He did this just as well 

 when the fingers in question were drawn apart by India- 

 rubber bands as when they were uninterfered with, showing 

 that the physiologically much greater innervation-current 

 required in the former case had no effect upon the conscious- 

 ness of the movement made, so far as its spatial character 

 at any rate was concerned. | 



* Revue Philosophique, xxiir. 443. 



t Ibid. XX. 604. 



t Herr Sternberg (Pfliiger's Archiv, xxxvii. p. 1) thinks that he proves 

 the feeling of innervation by the fact that when we have willed to make a 

 movement we generally think that it is made. We have already seen some 

 of the facts on pp. 105-6, above. S. cites from Exner the fact that if we 

 put a piece of hard rubber between our back teeth and bite, our front teeth 

 seem actually to approach each other, although it is physically impossible 



