WILL. 585 



forward ceU^ and ivill deepen itself more and more every time it 

 is used. 



Now the ' rearward cells,' so far, stand for all the sen- 

 sory cells of the brain other than the one which is discharg- 

 ing ; but such an indefinitely broad path would practically 

 be no better than no path, so here I make a third hypoth- 

 esis, which, taken together with the others, seems to me 

 to cover all the facts. It is that the deepest paths are formed 

 from the most drainable to the most draining cells; that the 

 tnost drainable cells are those ivhich have just been discharging ^ 

 and that the most draining cells are those ivhich are noio dis- 

 charging or in ivhich the tension is rising toivards the point of 

 discharge.^ Another diagram, Fig. 88, will make the matter 

 clear. Take the operation represented ••- — x^ 



by the previous diagram at the 

 moment when, the muscular contrac- 

 tion having occurred, the cell K is 

 discharging forward into M. Through 

 the dotted line p it will, according to 

 our third hypothesis, drain S (which, ^ 

 in the supposed case, has just dis- ""fig. 88 



charged into M by the connate path P, and caused the mus- 

 cular contraction), and the result is that p will now remain 

 as a new path open from S to K. When next S is excited 

 from without it will tend not only to discharge into M, 

 but into K as well. K thus gets excited directly by S before 

 it gets excited by the incoming current from the muscle ; 

 or, translated into psychic terms : ivhen c sensation has 

 once produced a movement in us, the next time ivc have the sen- 

 sation, it tends to suggest the idea of the movement, even before 

 the movement occurs, f 



* This brain-scheme seems oddly enough to give a certain basis of reality 

 to those hideously fabulous performances of the Herbartian Vorstellungen. 

 Herbart says that when one idea is inhibited by another it fuses with that 

 other and thereafter helps it to ascend into consciousness. Inhibition is 

 thus the basis of association in both schemes, for the 'draining ' of which 

 the text speaks is tantamount to an inhibition of the activity of the cella 

 which are drained, which inhibition makes the inhibited revive the in- 

 hibiter on later occasiops. 



f See the luminous passage in Miinsterberg : Die Willenshandlung, pp. 

 144-5. 



