WILL. 523 



do, but the perception of tlie fruit and the fleeting notion 

 that I may eat it seem fatally to bring the act about. 

 There is certainly no express fiat here ; any more than there 

 is in all those habitual goings and comings and rearrange- 

 ments of ourselves which fill every hour of the day, and 

 which incoming sensations instigate so immediately that it 

 is often difficult to decide whether not to call them reflex 

 rather than voluntary acts. We have seen in Chapter IV 

 that the intermediary terms of an habitual series of acts- 

 leading to an end are apt to be of this ^'wast-automatic sort. 

 As Lotze says : 



" "We see in writing or piano-playing a great number of very com- 

 plicated movements following quickly one upon the other, the instigative 

 representations of which remained scarcely a second in consciousness, 

 certainly not long enough to awaken any other volition than the gen- 

 eral one of resigning one's self without reserve to the passing over of rep- 

 resentation into action. All the acts of our daily life happen in this 

 M'ise : Our standing up, walking, talking, all this never demands a dis- 

 tinct impulse of the will, but is adequately brought about by the pure 

 flux of thought."* 



In all this the determining condition of the unhesitating 

 and resistless sequence of the act seems to be tlie abseiice of 

 any conflicting notion in the mind. Either there is nothing 

 else at all in the mind, or what is there does not conflict. 

 The hypnotic subject realizes the former condition. Ask 

 him what he is thinking about, and ten to one he will reply 

 'nothing.' The consequence is that he both believes every- 

 thing he is told, and performs every act that is suggested. 

 The suggestion may be a vocal command, or it may be the 

 performance before him of the movement required. Hyp- 

 notic subjects in certain conditions repeat whatever they 



* Medicinische Psychologie, p. 293. In his admirably acute chapter 

 on the Will this author has most explicitly maintained the position that 

 what we call muscular exertion is an afferent and not an efferent feeling ; 

 " We must affirm universally that in the muscular feeling we are not sen- 

 sible of the fo7'ce ou its way to produce an effect, but only of the sufferance 

 already produced in our movable organs, the muscles, after the force has, 

 in a manner unobservable by us, exerted upon them its causality " (p. 311). 

 How often the battles of psychology have to be fought over again, each 

 time with heavier armies and bigger trains, though not always with such 

 able generals 1 



