616 PSTGHOLOOT. 



On the whole, then, it seems as probable as anything 

 can well be, that these feelings of innervation do not exist. 



for them to do so. He proposes the following experiment : Lay the palm 

 of the hand on a table with the forefinger overlapping its edge and flexed 

 back as far as possible, whilst the table keeps the other fingers extended ; 

 then try to flex the terminal joint of the forefinger without looking. You 

 do not do it, and yet you think that you do. Here again the innervation, 

 according to the author, is felt as an executed movement. It seems to me, 

 as I said in the previous place, that the illusion is in all these cases due to 

 the inveterate association of ideas. Normally our will to move has always 

 been followed by the sensation that we have moved, except when the 

 simultaneous sensation of an external resistance was there. The result is 

 that where we feel no external resistance, and the muscles and tendons 

 tighten, the invariably associated idea is intense enough to be hallucinatory. 

 In the experiment with the teeth, the resistance customarily met with wheo 

 our masseters contract is a soft one. We do not close our teeth on a thing 

 like hard rubber once in a million times ; so when we do so, we imagine 

 the habitual result. — Persons with amputated limbs more often tlian not 

 continue to feel them as if they were still there, and can, moreover, give 

 themselves the feeling of moving them at will. The life-long sensorial 

 associate of the idea of 'working one's toes,' e.g. (uncorrected by any 

 opposite sensation, since no real sensation of non-movement can come 

 from non-existing toes), follows the idea and swallows it up. The man 

 thinks that his toes are 'working' (cf. Proceedings of American Soc. for 

 Psych. Research, p. 249). 



Herr Loeb also comes to the rescue of the feeling of innervation with 

 ob.servations of his own made after my text was written, but they convince 

 me no more than the arguments of others. Loeb's facts are these (Pfliiger's 

 Archiv, xliv. p. 1): If we stand before a vertical surface, and if. with our 

 hands at different lieights, we simultaneoiislp make with them what seem to us 

 equal!}' extensive movements, that movementalways turns out really shorter 

 which is made with the arm whose muscles (in virtue of the arm's position) 

 are already the more contracted. The same result ensues when the arms are 

 laterally uusymmetrical. Loeb assumes that both arms contract by virtue 

 of a common innervation, but that although this innervation^is relatively 

 less effective upon the more contracted arm, our feeling of its equal 

 strength overpowers the disparity of the incoming sensations of movement 

 which the two limbs send back, and makes us think that the spaces they 

 traverse are the same. "The sensation of the extent and direction of our 

 voluntary movements depends accordingly upon the impulse of our will to 

 move, and not upon the feelings set up by the motion in the active organ." 

 Now if this is the elementary law which Loeb calls it, why does it only 

 manifest its effect when both hands are moving simultaneously? Why 

 not when the same hand makes succemve movements? and especially why 

 not when both hands move sj'mmetricall}' or at the same level, but one of 

 them is tceighted? A weighted hand surely requires a stronger innervation 

 than an unweighted one to move an equal distance upwards ; and yet, as 

 Loeb confesses, we do not tend to overestimate the path which it trav- 

 erses under these circumstances. The fact is that the illusion which Loeb 



