THE FEELING OF EFFORT. 7 



one immediate conclusion follows : namely, that there are no such things as efferent feel- 

 ings, or feelings of innervation. These are wholly mythological entities. Whoever says 

 that in raising his arm he is ignorant of how many muscles he contracts, in what order of 

 sequence, and in what degrees of intensity, expressly avows a colossal amount of uncon- 

 sciousness of the processes of motor discharge. Each separate muscle at any rate cannot 

 have its distinct feeling of innervation. Wundt,^ who makes such enormous use of these 

 hypothetical feelings in his psychologic construction of space, is himself led to admit that 

 they have no differences of quality, but feel alike in all muscles, and vary only in their 

 degrees of intensity.^ They are used by the mind as guides, not of what movement, but 

 of how strong a movement it is making, or shall make. But does not this virtually sur- 

 render their existence altogether ? 



For if anything be obvious to introspection it is that the degree of strength of our 

 muscular contractions is completely revealed to us by afferent feelings coming from the 

 muscles themselves and their insertions, from the vicinity of the joints, and from the gen- 

 eral fixation of the larynx, chest, face and body, in the phenomenon of effort, objectively 

 considered. When a certain degree of energy of contraction rather than another 

 is thought of by us, this complex aggregate of afferent feelings, forming the material of 

 our thought, renders absolutely precise and distinctive our mental image of the exact 

 strength of movement to be made, and the exact amount of resistance to be overcome. 



Let the reader try to direct his wUl towards a particular movement, and then 

 notice what constituted the direction of the will. Was it anything over and 

 above the notion of the different feelings to which the movement when effected, 

 would give rise ? If we abstract from these feelings, will any sign, principle, 

 or means of orientation be left, by which the wUl may innervate the right 

 muscles with the right intensity, and not go astray into the wrong ones ? Strip 

 off these images of result,^ and so far from leaving us with a complete assortment 

 of directions into which our will may launch itself, you leave our consciousness in 

 an absolute and total vacuum. If I will to write "Peter" rather than "Paul," 

 it is the thought of certain digital sensations, of certain alphabetic sounds, of certain 

 appearances on the paper, and of no others, which immediately precedes the motion 

 of my pen. 



If I will to utter the word Paul rather than Peter, it is the thought of my 

 voice falling on my ear, and of certain muscular feelings in my tongue, lips and larynx, 

 which guide the utterance. All these feelings are afferent, and between the thought 

 of them, by which the act is mentally specified with all possible completeness, and 

 the act itself, there is no room for any third order of mental phenomenon. Except, 

 indeed, what I have called the fiat, the element of consent, or resolve that the 

 act shall ensue. This, doubtless, to the reader's mind, as to my own, constitutes 

 the essence of the voluntariness of the .act. This fiat will be treated of in detail 

 farther on. It may be entirely neglected here, for it is a constant coefficient, affecting 

 all voluntary actions alike, and incapable of serving to distinguish them. No one 



1 Leidesdorf u. Meynert's Vierteljsch. f. Psyohiatrie Bd. i, word Effecishild to designate our idea of this sensory result 

 Hefti, S. 36-7. 1867. Physiologisclie Psychologie, S. 316. of a movement. 



2 Harless, in an article which in many respects forestalls » We speak here only of the muscular exertion, properly so 

 what I have to say, (Der Apparat des Willens, in Fichte's called. The difficulty often involved in making the fiat still 

 Zeitschrift f. Philos., Bd. 38, 1861) uses the convenient remains a reserved question. 



