626 PSYCHOLOGY. 



We may then lay it down for certain that every repre- 

 sentation of a movement aiuakens in some degree the actual 

 movement tvhich is its object; and aioakens it in a maximum 

 degree ivhenever it is not kept from so doing by an antagonis- 

 tic representation present simultaneously to the mind. 



The express fiat, or act of mental consent to the move- 

 ment, comes in when the neutralization of the antagonistic 

 and inhibitory idea is required. But that there is no express 

 fiat needed when the conditions are simple, the reader ought 

 now to be convinced. Lest, however, he should still share the 

 common prejudice that voluntary action without 'exertion 

 of will-power ' is Hamlet with the prince's part left out, I 

 will make a few farther remarks. The first point to start 

 from in understanding voluntary action, and the possible 

 occurrence of it with no fiat or express resolve, is the fact 

 that consciousness is in its very nature impulsive.* We do 

 not have a sensation or a thought and then have to add 

 something dynamic to it to get a movement. Every pulse 

 of feeling which we have is the correlate of some neural 

 activity that is already on its way to instigate a movement. 

 Our sensations and thoughts are but cross-sections, as it 

 ■were, of currents whose essential consequence is motion, 

 and which no sooner run in at one nerve than they run out 

 again at another. The popular notion that mere conscious- 

 ness as such is not essentially a forerunner of activity, that 

 the latter must result from some superadded ' will-force,' 

 is a very natural inference from those special cases in 

 wdiich we think of an act for an indefinite length of time 

 without the action taking place. These cases, however, are 

 not the norm ; they are cases of inhibition by antagonistic 



* I abstract here from the fact that a certain intensity of the conscious- 

 ness is required for its impulsiveness to be etiective in a complete degree. 

 There is an inertia in the motor processes as in all other natural things. 

 In certain individuals, and at certain times (disease, fatigue), the inertia is 

 unusually great, and we may then have ideas of action which produce no 

 visible act, but discharge themselves into merely nascent dispositions to 

 activity or into emotional expression. The inertia of the motor parts here 

 plays the same role as is elsewhere played by antagonistic ideas. We shall 

 consider this restrictive inertia later on; it obviously introduces no essen- 

 tial alteration into the law which the text lays down 



