VOLITION. 
55 
cord, or the sympathetic ganglia. These do not require the 
co-operation of the cerebrum, and may be performed by an 
acephalous child. 
Next in order come the secondary automatic actions, 
which do at first require a conscious effort, but which after 
frequent repetition become organic habits so that they are 
effortless, and often unconscious. But some of these, indeed 
perhaps the larger part, avail themselves of an inherited but 
imperfect nervous mechanism, which would be better called 
an organic predisposition. These may be subdivided into 
three groups. 
The first group is called excito-motor , and depends upon 
the activity of the spinal cord; it includes the movements of 
the limbs in walking, running, grasping, &c. 
The second group depends upon the sensory ganglia at 
the base of the brain, and includes the closure of the lid 
when a bright light strikes the eye, the following of light 
with the eye, the shifting from an uncomfortable position ; 
all of which may occur when the attention is completely 
absorbed by other ideas. These two groups may or may not 
be accompanied by consciousness. 
The third group is ideo-motor, and depends on the 
cerebral hemispheres ; including the various movements of 
features and limbs expressive of emotion ; the shudder excited 
by some horrible story; the cries uttered in presence of some 
real or imagined danger. There are, however, involuntary 
cerebral processes which are ideal, but not motor, or which 
only issue in motion after a more or less lengthened interval. 
Such are the effortless successions of thoughts and feelings 
with which great part of our time is filled ; such are those 
processes which represent the physical side of thought and 
feeling, but never pass the threshold of consciousness, and 
make themselves known only by their results. Dreams also, 
and the phenomena of somnambulism and hypnotism, belong 
to the ideal or the ideo-motor group. These last never 
indeed, or rarely, constitute organised habits in the sense in 
which walking, blinking, shuddering are habitual. But they 
always are the outcome of mental habits. For instance, the 
mathematician, who solved a problem in his sleep which he 
was unable to solve awake, certainly was not in the habit of 
solving that special problem. But he had a mathematical 
habit of mind; an organised mode of mental association which 
enabled him to strike into likely paths, and to do this all the 
better in the absence of the nervous tension caused by anxiety 
to succeed. So Coleridge uttered interminable monologues, 
and composed “Kubla Khan” in sleep, as the result of an 
