WILL. 02] 



I trust that I have now made clear what that * idea oi 

 a movement ' is which must precede it in order that it be 

 voluntary. It is not the thought of the innervation which 

 the movement requires. It is the anticipation of the move- 

 ment's sensible effects, resident or remote, and sometimes 

 very remote indeed. Such anticipations, to say the least, 

 determine what our movements shall be. I have spoken all 

 along as if they also might determine that they shall be. 

 This, no doubt, has disconcerted many readers, for it cer- 

 tainly seems as if a special fiat, or consent to the movement 

 were required in addition to the mere conception of it, in 

 many cases of volition ; and this fiat I have altogether left 

 out of my account. This leads us to the next point in the 



these (hysterical) cases as requiring the 'dynamogenic ' stimulus of light (see 

 above, p. 377). They might, however, be cases of such congeuitally defective 

 optical imagiuatiou that the 'mental cue' was normally ' tactile ;' and that 

 when this tactile cue failed through functional inertness of the kinoesthetic 

 centres, the only optical cue strong enough to determine the discharge had 

 to be an actual sensation of the eye. — There is still a third class of cases in 

 which the limbs have lost all sensibility, even for movements passively im- 

 printed, but in which voluntar}' movements can be accurately executed 

 even when the eyes are closed. MM. Binet and Fere have reported some 

 of these interesting cases, which are found amongst the hysterical hemian- 

 aesthetics. They can, for example, write accurately at will, although tlieir 

 eyes are closed and they have no feeling of the writing taking place, and 

 many of them do not know when it begins or stops. Asked to write re- 

 peatedly the letter a, and then say how many times they have written it, 

 some are able to assign the number and some are not. Some of them admit 

 that they are guided by visual imagination of what is being done. Cf. 

 Archives de Physiologic, Oct. 1887, pp. 363-5. Now it would seem at 

 first sight that feelings of outgoing innervation must exist in these cases 

 and be kept account of. There are no other guiding impressions, either 

 immediate or remote, of which the patient is conscious ; and unless feelings 

 of innervation be there, the writing would seem miraculous. But if such 

 feelings are present in these cases, and suffice to direct accurately the suc- 

 cession of movements, why do they not suffice in those other anaesthetic 

 cases in which movement becomes disorderly when the eyes are closed. 

 Innervation is there, or there would be no movement ; why is the feeling 

 of the innervation gone ? The truth seems to be, as M. Binet supposes 

 (Rev. Philos., xxiii. p. 479), that these cases are not arguments for the feel- 

 ing of innervation. They are pathological curiosities ; and the patients are 

 not really anaesthetic, but are victims of that curious dissociation or splitting- 

 ofi of one part of their consciousness from the rest which we are just begin 

 to understand, thanks to Messrs. Janet, Binet, and Gurney, and in which 

 the split-off part (in this case the kinaesthetic sensations) may nevertheless 

 remain to produce its usual effects. Compare what was said above, p. 49). 



