[458] Ibid. xx. 604.
[459] Herr Sternberg (Pflüger's Archiv, xxxvii. p. 1) thinks that he proves the feeling of innervation by the fact that when we have willed to make a movement we generally think that it is made. We have already seen some of the facts on [pp. 105-6], above. S. cites from Exner the fact that if we put a piece of hard rubber between our back teeth and bite, our front teeth seem actually to approach each other, although it is physically impossible for them to do so. He proposes the following experiment: Lay the palm of the hand on a table with the forefinger overlapping its edge and flexed back as far as possible, whilst the table keeps the other fingers extended; then try to flex the terminal joint of the forefinger without looking. You do not do it, and yet you think that you do. Here again the innervation, according to the author, is felt as an executed movement. It seems to me, as I said in the previous place, that the illusion is in all these cases due to the inveterate association of ideas. Normally our will to move has always been followed by the sensation that we have moved, except when the simultaneous sensation of an external resistance was there. The result is that where we feel no external resistance, and the muscles and tendons tighten, the invariably associated idea is intense enough to be hallucinatory. In the experiment with the teeth, the resistance customarily met with when our masseters contract is a soft one. We do not close our teeth on a thing like hard rubber once in a million times; so when we do so, we imagine the habitual result.—Persons with amputated limbs more often than not continue to feel them as if they were still there, and can, moreover, give themselves the feeling of moving them at will. The life-long sensorial associate of the idea of 'working one's toes,' e.g. (uncorrected by any opposite sensation, since no real sensation of non-movement can come from non-existing toes), follows the idea and swallows it up. The man thinks that his toes are 'working' (cf. Proceedings of American Soc. for Psych. Research, p. 249).
Herr Loeb also comes to the rescue of the feeling of innervation with observations of his own made after my text was written, but they convince me no more than the arguments of others. Loeb's facts are these (Pflüger's Archiv, xliv. p. 1): If we stand before a vertical surface, and if, with our hands at different heights, we simultaneously make with them what seem to us equally extensive movements, that movement always turns out really shorter which is made with the arm whose muscles (in virtue of the arm's position) are already the more contracted. The same result ensues when the arms are laterally unsymmetrical. Loeb assumes that both arms contract by virtue of a common innervation, but that although this innervation is relatively less effective upon the more contracted arm, our feeling of its equal strength overpowers the disparity of the incoming sensations of movement which the two limbs send back, and makes us think that the spaces they traverse are the same. "The sensation of the extent and direction of our voluntary movements depends accordingly upon the impulse of our will to move, and not upon the feelings set up by the motion in the active organ." Now if this is the elementary law which Loeb calls it, why does it only manifest its effect when both hands are moving simultaneously? Why not when the same hand makes successive movements? and especially why not when both hands move symmetrically or at the same level, but one of them is weighted? A weighted hand surely requires a stronger innervation than an unweighted one to move an equal distance upwards; and yet, as Loeb confesses, we do not tend to overestimate the path which it traverses under these circumstances. The fact is that the illusion which Loeb has studied is a complex resultant of many factors. One of them, it seems to me, is an instinctive tendency to revert to the type of the bilateral movements of childhood. In adult life we move our arms for the most part in alternation; but in infancy the free movements of the arms are almost always similar on both sides, symmetrical when the direction of motion is horizontal, and with the hands on the same level when it is vertical. The most natural innervation, when the movements are rapidly performed, is one which takes the movement hack to this form. Our estimation meanwhile of the lengths severally traversed by the two hands is mainly based, as such estimations with closed eyes usually are (see Loeb's own earlier paper, Untersuchungen über den Fühlraum der Hand, in Pflüger's Archiv, xli. 107), upon the apparent velocity and duration of the movement. The duration is the same for both hands, since the movements begin and end simultaneously. The velocities of the two hands are under the experimental conditions almost impossible of comparison. It is well known how imperfect a discrimination of weights we have when we 'heft' them simultaneously, one in either hand; and G. E. Müller has well shown (Pflüger's Archiv, xlv. 57) that the velocity of the lift is the main factor in determining our judgment of weight. It is hardly possible to conceive of more unfavorable conditions for making an accurate comparison of the length of two movements than those which govern the experiments which are under discussion. The only prominent sign is the duration, which would lead us to infer the equality of the two movements. We consequently deem them equal, though a native tendency in our motor centres keeps them from being so.
[460] This is by no means an unplausible opinion. See Vol. I. p. 65.
[461] Maine de Biran, Royer Collard, Sir John Herschel, Dr. Carpenter, Dr. Martineau, all seem to posit a force-sense by which, in becoming aware of an outer resistance to our will, we are taught the existence of an outer world. I hold that every peripheral sensation gives us an outer world. An insect crawling on our skin gives us as 'outward' an impression as a hundred pounds weighing on our back.—I have read M. A. Bertrand's criticism of my views (La Psychologie de l'Effort, 1889); but as he seems to think that I deny the feeling of effort altogether, I can get no profit from it, despite his charming way of saying things.
[462] Bowditch and Southard in Journal of Physiology, vol. iii. No. 3. It was found in these experiments that the maximum of accuracy was reached when two seconds of time elapsed between locating the object by eye or hand and starting to touch it. When the mark was located with one hand, and the other hand had to touch it, the error was considerably greater than when the same hand both located and touched it.
[463] The same caution must be shown in discussing pathological cases. There are remarkable discrepancies in the effects of peripheral anæsthesia upon the voluntary power. Such cases as I quoted in the text ([p. 490]) are by no means the only type. In those cases the patients could move their limbs accurately when the eyes were open, and inaccurately when they were shut. In other cases, however, the anæsthetic patients cannot move their limbs at all when the eyes are shut. (For reports of two such cases see Bastian in 'Brain,' Binet in Rev. Philos., xxv. 478.) M. Binet explains these (hysterical) cases as requiring the 'dynamogenic' stimulus of light (see above, [p. 377]). They might, however, be cases of such congenitally defective optical imagination that the 'mental cue' was normally 'tactile;' and that when this tactile cue failed through functional inertness of the kinæsthetic centres, the only optical cue strong enough to determine the discharge had to be an actual sensation of the eye.—There is still a third class of cases in which the limbs have lost all sensibility, even for movements passively imprinted, but in which voluntary movements can be accurately executed even when the eyes are closed. MM. Binet and Féré have reported some of these interesting cases, which are found amongst the hysterical hemianæsthetics. They can, for example, write accurately at will, although their eyes are closed and they have no feeling of the writing taking place, and many of them do not know when it begins or stops. Asked to write repeatedly the letter a, and then say how many times they have written it, some are able to assign the number and some are not. Some of them admit that they are guided by visual imagination of what is being done. Cf. Archives de Physiologie, Oct. 1887, pp. 363-5. Now it would seem at first sight that feelings of outgoing innervation must exist in these cases and be kept account of. There are no other guiding impressions, either immediate or remote, of which the patient is conscious; and unless feelings of innervation be there, the writing would seem miraculous. But if such feelings are present in these cases, and suffice to direct accurately the succession of movements, why do they not suffice in those other anæsthetic cases in which movement becomes disorderly when the eyes are closed? Innervation is there, or there would be no movement; why is the feeling of the innervation gone? The truth seems to be, as M. Binet supposes (Rev. Philos., xxiii. p. 479), that these cases are not arguments for the feeling of innervation. They are pathological curiosities; and the patients are not really anæsthetic, but are victims of that curious dissociation or splitting-off of one part of their consciousness from the rest which we are just beginning to understand, thanks to Messrs. Janet, Binet, and Gurney, and in which the split-off part (in this case the kinæsthetic sensations) may nevertheless remain to produce its usual effects. Compare what was said above, [p. 491].
[464] Medicinische Psychologie, p. 293. In his admirably acute chapter on the Will this author has most explicitly maintained the position that what we call muscular exertion is an afferent and not an efferent feeling; "We must affirm universally that in the muscular feeling we are not sensible of the force on its way to produce an effect, but only of the sufferance already produced in our movable organs, the muscles, after the force has, in a manner unobservable by us, exerted upon them its causality" (p. 311). How often the battles of psychology have to be fought over again, each time with heavier armies and bigger trains, though not always with such able generals!
[465] Ch. Féré: Sensation et Mouvement (1887), chapter iii.
[466] Professor A. Bain (Senses and Intellect, pp 336-48) and Dr. W. B. Carpenter (Mental Physiology, chap. vi) give examples in abundance.