624 PSYCHOLOGY. 



hear you say, and imitate whatever they see you do. Dr. 

 Tere says that certain waking persons of neurotic type, if 

 one repeatedly close and open one's hand before their eyes, 

 soon begin to have corresponding feelings in their own fin- 

 gers, and presently begin irresistibly to execute the move- 

 ments which they see. Under these conditions of ' prepa- 

 ration ' Dr. Fere found that his subjects could squeeze the 

 hand-dynamometer much more strongly than when abruptly 

 invited to do so. A few passive repetitions of a movement 

 will enable many enfeebled patients to execute it actively 

 with greater strength. These observations beautifully 

 show how the mere quickening of kinsesthetic ideas is 

 equivalent to a certain amount of tension towards discharge 

 in the f^^tres.* 



We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing 

 morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital 

 principle within us protests against the ordeal. Probably 

 most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at 

 a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We 

 think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will 

 suffer ; we say, " I must get up, this is ignominious," etc. ; 

 but still the warm couch feels too delicious, the cold out- 

 side too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones 

 itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of 

 bursting the resistance and passing over into the decisive 

 act. Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances ? 

 If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often 

 than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We 

 suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of 

 consciousness occurs ; we forget both the warmth and the 

 cold ; we fall into some rever}^ connected with the day's 

 life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, 

 " Hollo ! I must lie here no longer " — an idea which at that 

 lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing sug- 

 gestions, and consequently produces immediately its appro- 

 priate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of 

 both the warmth and the cold during the period of struggle, 



* Cb. Fere : Sensation et Mouvement (1887), chapter iii. 



