THE FEELING OP EFFORT. i<j 



Our standing up, walking, talking, all this never demands a distinct impulse of the will, 

 but is adequately brought about by the pure flux of thought." 



Dr. Carpenter has proposed the name ideo-motor for these actions without a special 

 fiat. And in the chapter of his Mental Physiology bearing this title may be found a very 

 full collection of instances.^ It is to be noted that among the most frequent cases 

 of this sort are those acts which result from ideas or perceptions, intercurrent as 

 it were to the main stream of our thought, and it may be logically disconnected 

 therewith. I am earnestly talking with a friend, when I notice a piece of string 

 on the floor. The next instant I have picked it up, with no deliberate resolve to 

 do so, and with no check to my conversation. Or, I am lying in my Avarm bed 

 engrossed in some revery or other, when the notion suddenly strikes me "it is 

 getting late," and before I know it, I am up in the cold, having executed without 

 the smallest effort of resolve, an action which, half an hour previous, with full 

 consciousness of the pros and the cons, the warm rest and the chill, the sluggishness 

 and the manliness, time lost and the mornmg's duties, I was utterly unable to decide upon. 



I then lay it down as a second corner-stake in our inquiry, that every representation 

 of a motion awakens the actual motion which is its object, unless inhibited by some 

 antagonistic representation simidtaneously present to the mind. 



It is somewhat dangerous to base dogmatic conclusions on the experiments so far 

 made on the cerebral cortex, nevertheless they may help to confirm conclusions 

 already probable on other grounds. Munk's vivisectional experiments on the cortical 

 centres seem much the most minute and elaborate which have yet been reported. 

 Now Munk concludes from them that the so-called motor centres of Hitzig and 

 Perrier, each of which, when electrically irritated, provokes a characteristic movement 

 in some part of the body, are sensory centres, — the centres for the feelings of 

 touch, pressure, position, and motion of the bodily parts in question. The entire 

 zone which contains them is called by him the F'dhlsph'dre of the cerebral surface, 

 and is made coordinate with the Sehsphdre and Horsphdre? 



Electric excitement of the fore paw centre can then only give us an image of the paw 

 in some resultant state of flexion or extension. And the reason why motor effects occur 

 like clock-work when this centre is irritated, would be that this image is awakened with 

 such extraordinary vivacity by the stimulus that no other idea in the animal's mind can 

 be strong enough to inhibit its discharging into the insertient motor centres below. 



Now the reader may still shake his head and say : " But can you seriously mean that 

 all the wonderfully exact adjustment of my action's strength to its ends, is not a matter 

 of outgoing ianervation ? Here is a cannon ball, and here a pasteboard box : instantly 

 and accurately I lift each from the table, the ball not refusing to rise because my inner- 

 vation was too weak, the box not flying abruptly into the au"' because it was too strong. 



' Prof. Bain has also amply illustrated the subject in his Jq the Innervationsgefuhl, only he supposes it to be a result 



work oil the Senses and Intellect, 3d edition, pages 336 to of the activity of the lower motor centres, not coming to 



343. He considers that these facts prove that the ideas of consciousness m si(u, but transmitted upwards by fibres to 



motion inhabit iilentical nerve tracts with the actualized the zone in question, and there perceived along with the 



motions. passive feelings of the part involved. It is needless to say 



that there is not an atom of objective ground for the belief in 



^H. Munk (Du Bois-Reymond's Archiv fiir Physiologie, these afferent innervation feelings — even less than for the 



1878, pp. 177-8 and 549). It is true that Munk still believes efferent ones ordinarily assumed. 



