[441] Leidesdorf u. Meynert's Vierteljsch. f. Psychiatrie, Bd. i. Heft i. S. 36-7 (1867). Physiologische Psychologie, 1st ed. S. 316.
[442] Professor Fouillée, who defends them in the Revue Philosophique, xxviii, 561 ff., also admits (p. 574) that they are the same whatever be the movement, and that all our discrimination of which movement we are innervating is afferent, consisting of sensations after, and of sensory images before, the act.
[443] Cf. Souriau in Rev. Philosophique, xxii. 454.—Professor G. E. Müller thus describes some of his experiments with weights: If, after lifting a weight of 8000 grams a number of times we suddenly get a weight of only 500 grams to lift, "this latter weight is then lifted with a velocity which strikes every onlooker, so that the receptacle for the weight with all its contents often flies high up as if it carried the arm along with it, and the energy with which it is raised is sometimes so entirely out of proportion to the weight itself, that the contents of the receptacle are slung out upon the table in spite of the mechanical obstacles which such a result has to overcome. A more palpable proof that the trouble here is a wrong adaptation of the motor impulse could not be given." Pflüger's Archiv, xlv. 47. Compare also p. 57, and the quotation from Hering on the same page.
[444] Archiv für Psychiatrie, iii. 618-635. Bernhardt strangely enough seems to think that what his experiments disprove is the existence of afferent muscular feelings, not those of efferent innervation—apparently because he deems that the peculiar thrill of the electricity ought to overpower all other afferent feelings from the part. But it is far more natural to interpret his results the other way, even aside from the certainty yielded by other evidence that passive muscular feelings exist. This other evidence, after being compendiously summed up by Sachs in Reichert und Du Bois' Archiv (1874), pp. 174-188, is, as far as the anatomical and physiological grounds go, again thrown into doubt by Mays, Zeitschrift f. Biologie, Bd. xx.
[445] Functions of the Brain, p. 228.
[446] Vorlesungen über Menschen und Thierseele, i. 222.
[447] In some instances we get an opposite result. Dr. H. Charlton Bastian (British Medical Journal (1869), p. 461, note), says:
"Ask a man whose lower extremities are completely paralyzed, whether, when he ineffectually wills to move either of these limbs, he is conscious of an expenditure of energy in any degree proportionate to that which he would have experienced if his muscles had naturally responded to his volition. He will tell us rather that he has a sense only of his utter powerlessness, and that his volition is a mere mental act, carrying with it no feelings of expended energy such as he is accustomed to experience when his muscles are in powerful action, and from which action and its consequences alone, as I think, he can derive any adequate notion of resistance."
[448] Münsterberg's words may be added: "In lifting an object in the hand I can discover no sensation of volitional energy. I perceive in the first place a slight tension about the head, but that this results from a contraction in the head muscles, and not from a feeling of the brain-discharge, is shown by the simple fact that I get the tension on the right side of the head when I move the right arm, whereas the motor discharge takes place in the opposite side of the brain.... In maximal contractions of body- and limb-muscles there occur, as if it were to reinforce them, those special contractions of the muscles of the face [especially frowning and clinching teeth] and those tensions of the skin of the head. These sympathetic movements, felt particularly on the side which makes the effort, are perhaps the immediate ground why we ascribe our awareness of maximal contraction to the region of the head, and call it a consciousness of force, instead of a peripheral sensation." (Die Willenshandlung (1888), pp. 73, 82.) Herr Münsterberg's work is a little masterpiece, which appeared after my text was written. I shall have repeatedly to refer to it again, and cordially recommend to the reader its most thorough refutation of the Innervationsgefühl-theory.
[449] Physiologische Optik, p. 600.