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evolutionist ought to have no difficulty in explaining these terrors, and the scenery that provokes them, as relapses into the consciousness of the cave-men, a consciousness usually overlaid in us by experiences of more recent date.

There are certain other pathological fears, and certain peculiarities in the expression of ordinary fear, which might receive an explanatory light from ancestral conditions, even infra-human ones. In ordinary fear, one may either run, or remain semi-paralyzed. The latter condition reminds us of the so-called death-shamming instinct shown by many animals. Dr. Lindsay, in his work 'Mind in Animals,' says this must require great self-command in those that practise it. But it is really no feigning of death at all, and requires no self-command. It is simply a terror-paralysis which has been so useful as to become hereditary. The beast of prey does not think the motionless bird, insect, or crustacean dead. He simply fails to notice them at all; because his senses, like ours, are much more strongly excited by a moving object than by a still one. It is the same instinct which leads a boy playing 'I spy' to hold his very breath when the seeker is near, and which makes the beast of prey himself in many cases motionlessly lie in wait for his victim or silently 'stalk' it, by stealthy advances alternated with periods of immobility. It is the opposite of the instinct which makes us jump up and down and move our arms when we wish to attract the notice of someone passing far away, and makes the shipwrecked sailor upon the raft where he is floating frantically wave a cloth when a distant sail appears. Now, may not the statue-like, crouching immobility of some melancholiacs, insane with general anxiety and fear of everything, be in some way connected with this old instinct? They can give no reason for their fear to move; but immobility makes them feel safer and more comfortable. Is not this the mental state of the 'feigning' animal?

Again, take the strange symptom which has been de

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scribed of iate years by the rather absurd name of agoraphobia. The patient is seized with palpitation and terror at the sight of any open place or broad street which he has to cross alone. He trembles, his knees bend, he may even faint at the idea. Where he has sufficient self-command he sometimes accomplishes the object by keeping safe under the lee of a vehicle going across, or joining himself to a knot of other people. But usually he slinks round the sides of the square, hugging the houses as closely as he This emotion has no utility in a civilized man, but when we notice the chronic agoraphobia of our domestic cats, and see the tenacious way in which many wild animals, especially rodents, cling to cover, and only venture on a dash across the open as a desperate measureeven then making for every stone or bunch of weeds which may give a momentary shelter-when we see this we are strongly tempted to ask whether such an odd kind of fear in us be not due to the accidental resurrection, through disease, of a sort of instinct which may in some of our remote ancestors have had a permanent and on the whole a useful part to play?

CHAPTER XXIII.

WILL.

Voluntary Acts.-Desire, wish, will, are states of mind which everyone knows, and which no definition can make plainer. We desire to feel, to have, to do, all sorts of things which at the moment are not felt, had, or done. If with the desire there goes a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply wish; but if we believe that the end is in our power, we will that the desired feeling, having, or doing shall be real; and real it presently becomes, either immediately upon the willing or after certain preliminaries have been fulfilled.

The only ends which follow immediately upon our willing seem to be movements of our own bodies. Whatever feelings and havings we may will to get come in as results. of preliminary movements which we make for the purpose. This fact is too familiar to need illustration; so that we may start with the proposition that the only direct outward effects of our will are bodily movements. The mechanism of production of these voluntary movements is what befalls us to study now.

They are secondary performances. The movements we have studied hitherto have been automatic and reflex, and (on the first occasion of their performance, at any rate) unforeseen by the agent. The movements to the study of which we now address ourselves, being desired and intended beforehand, are of course done with full prevision of what they are to be. It follows from this that voluntary movements must be secondary, not primary, functions of our organism. This is the first point to understand in the psychology of Volition. Reflex, instinctive, and emotional

movements are all primary performances.
The nerve-
centres are so organized that certain stimuli pull the
trigger of certain explosive parts; and a creature going
through one of these explosions for the first time under-
goes an entirely novel experience. The other day I was
standing at a railroad station with a little child, when an
express-train went thundering by. The child, who was
near the edge of the platform, started, winked, had his
breathing convulsed, turned pale, burst out crying, and
ran frantically towards me and hid his face. I have no
doubt that this youngster was almost as much astonished
by his own behavior as he was by the train, and more than
I was, who stood by. Of course if such a reaction has
many times occurred we learn what to expect of ourselves,
and can then foresee our conduct, even though it remain
as involuntary and uncontrollable as it was before. But
if, in voluntary action properly so called, the act must be
foreseen, it follows that no creature not endowed with pro-
phetic power can perform an act voluntarily for the first
time. Well, we are no more endowed with prophetic vision
of what movements lie in our power than we are endowed
with prophetic vision of what sensations we are capable of
receiving. As we must wait for the sensations to be given
us, so we must wait for the movements to be performed
involuntarily, before we can frame ideas of what either of
these things are. We learn all our possibilities by the way
of experience. When a particular movement, having once
occurred in a random, reflex, or involuntary way, has left
an image of itself in the memory, then the movement can
be desired again, and deliberately willed. But it is impos-
sible to see how it could be willed before.

A supply of ideas of the various movements that are possible, left in the memory by experiences of their involuntary performance, is thus the first prerequisite of the voluntary life.

Two Kinds of Ideas of Movement.-Now these ideas may be either resident or remote. That is, they may be of the

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movement as it feels, when taking place, in the moving parts; or they may be of the movement as it feels in some other part of the body which it affects (strokes, presses, scratches, etc.), or as it sounds, or as it looks. The resident sensations in the parts that move have been called kinesthetic feelings, the memories of them are kinæsthetic ideas. It is by these kinæsthetic sensations that we are made conscious of passive movements—movements communicated to our limbs by others. If you lie with closed eyes, and another person noiselessly places your arm or leg in any arbitrarily chosen attitude, you receive a feeling of what attitude it is, and can reproduce it yourself in the arm or leg of the opposite side. Similarly a man waked suddenly from sleep in the dark is aware of how he finds himself lying. At least this is what happens in normal cases. But when the feelings of passive movement as well as all the other feelings of a limb are lost, we get such results as are given in the following account by Prof. A. Strümpell of his wonderful anæsthetic boy, whose only sources of feeling were the right eye and the left ear:

*

"Passive movements could be imprinted on all the extremities to the greatest extent, without attracting the patient's notice. Only in violent forced hyperextension of the joints, especially of the knees, there arose a dull vague feeling of strain, but this was seldom precisely localized. We have often, after bandaging the eyes of the patient, carried him about the room, laid him on a table, given to his arms and legs the most fantastic and apparently the most inconvenient attitudes without his having a suspicion of it. The expression of astonishment in his face, when all at once the removal of the handkerchief revealed his situation, is indescribable in words. Only when his head was made to hang away down he immediately spoke of dizziness, but could not assign its ground. Later he sometimes inferred from the sounds

* Deutsches Archiv f. Klin. Medicin, xxii. 321.

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