Laws and Hypotheses for Behavior 261 
this page, and make the movement. It may seem at first 
sight that having the idea entirely unopposed was the suffi- 
cient cause of the act. But careful experiment, including, 
for instance, the closure of the eyes and anesthesia of the 
fingers will reveal that the original propulsion of the idea is 
not to just that act, but to many possibilities, and that its 
chief potency lies in the fact that not to get the finger to 
that point is annoying, and that consequently the organism 
is at peace only when the act is done. 
So far it has been shown that ::The majority of responses 
are not produced by ideas of them. The idea of a response 
may be impotent to produce it. The idea of one act may 
produce a different, even an opposite act. When an idea 
seems to produce a response in and of itself, it may really act 
by determining the satisfyingness of responses otherwise 
made. | These facts are sufficient to destroy the pretensions 
of any general law that the image of an act will, other things 
being equal, produce it.) But the possibility that such an 
image may occasionally exercise this peculiar potency re- 
mains. 
I despair of convincing the reader that it does not. Man 
is the only animal possessing a large fund of ideas of acts, 
and man’s connection-system is so complex and his ideas of 
acts are so intricately bound to situations that have by 
use and effect produced those acts, that the proof of this 
negative is a practical impossibility. | But it is possible to 
show that even the most favored cases for the production 
of a response by securing an ideal representation of it may 
be explainable by use and effect alone, | 
f The extreme apparent potency of ideas representing acts 
to produce them regardless of bonds of use or effect is, of 
course, witnessed in the phenomena of suggestion in hyp- 
nosis and allied states. To try to reduce these phenomena 
