WILL. 519 



more aucl more from cousciousness, and that tlie more 

 practised we become in a movement, the more 'remote ' do 

 the ideas become which form its mental cue. What we are 

 interested in is what sticks in our consciousness ; everything 

 else we get rid of as quickly as we can. Our resident feel- 

 ings of movement have no substantive interest for us at all, 

 as a rule. What interest us are the ends which the move- 

 ment is to attain. Such an end is generally an outer im- 

 pression on the eye or ear, or sometimes on the skin, nose, 

 or palate. Now let the idea of the end associate itself 

 definitely with the right motor innervation, and the thought 

 of the innervation's resident eifects will become as great an 

 encumbrance as we formerly concluded that the feeling of 

 the innervation itself would be. The mind does not need it ; 

 the end alone is enough. 



The idea of the end, then, tends more and more to make 

 itself all-sufficient. Or, at any rate, if the kinaesthetic ideas 

 are called up at all, they are so swamped in the vivid 

 kinesthetic feelings by which they are immediately over- 

 taken that we have no time to be aware of their separate 

 existence. As I write, I have no anticipation, as a thing 

 distinct from my sensation, of either the look or the digital 

 feel of the letters which flow from my pen. The words 

 chime on my mental ear, as it were, before I write them, 

 but not on my mental eye or hand. This comes from the 

 rapidity with which often-repeated movements follow on 

 their mental cue. An end consented to as soon as conceived 

 innervates directly the centre of the first movement of the 

 chain which leads to its accomplishment, and then the 

 whole chain rattles off quasi-ref^exlj, as was described on 

 pp. 115-6 of Vol. I. 



The reader will certainly recognize this to be true in 

 all fluent and unhesitating voluntary acts. The only special 

 fiat there is at the outset of the performance. A man says 

 to himself, " I must change my shirt," and involuntarily he 

 has taken off his coat, and his fingers are at work in their 

 accustomed manner on his waistcoat-buttons, etc. ; or 

 we say, "I must go downstairs," and ere we know it we 

 have risen, walked, and turned the handle of the door ; — all 

 through the idea of an end coupled with a series of guiding 



