[467] For a full account, by an expert, of the 'willing-game,' see Mr. Stuart Cumberland's article: A Thought-reader's Experiences in the Nineteenth century, xx. 867. M. Gley has given a good example of ideo-motor action in the Bulletins de la Société de Psychologie Physiologique for 1889. Tell a person to think intently of a certain name, and saying that you will then force her to write it, let her hold a pencil, and do you yourself hold her hand. She will then probably trace the name involuntarily, believing that you are forcing her to do it.
[468] I abstract here from the fact that a certain intensity of the consciousness is required for its impulsiveness to be effective in a complete degree. There is an inertia in the motor processes as in all other natural things. In certain individuals, and at certain times (disease, fatigue), the inertia is unusually great, and we may then have ideas of action which produce no visible act, but discharge themselves into merely nascent dispositions to activity or into emotional expression. The inertia of the motor parts here plays the same rôle as is elsewhere played by antagonistic ideas. We shall consider this restrictive inertia later on, it obviously introduces no essential alteration into the law which the text lays down.
[469] I use the common phraseology here for mere convenience' sake. The reader who has made himself acquainted with Chapter IX will always understand, when he hears of many ideas simultaneously present to the mind and acting upon each other, that what is really meant is a mind with one idea before it, of many objects, purposes, reasons, motives, related to each other, some in a harmonious and some in an antagonistic way. With this caution I shall not hesitate from time to time to fall into the popular Lockian speech, erroneous though I believe it to be.
[470] My attention was first emphatically called to this class of decisions by my colleague, Professor C. C. Everett.
[471] In an excellent article on The 'Mental Qualities of an Athlete' in the Harvard Monthly, vol. vi. p. 43, Mr. A. T. Dudley assigns the first place to the rapidly impulsive temperament. "Ask him how, in some complex trick, he performed a certain act, why he pushed or pulled at a certain instant, and he will tell you he does not know; he did it by instinct; or rather his nerves and muscles did it of themselves.... Here is the distinguishing feature of the good player: the good player, confident in his training and his practice, in the critical game trusts entirely to his impulse, and does not think out every move. The poor player, unable to trust his impulsive actions, is compelled to think carefully all the time. He thus not only loses the opportunities through his slowness in comprehending the whole situation, but, being compelled to think rapidly all the time, at critical points becomes confused; while the first-rate player, not trying to reason, but acting as impulse directs, is continually distinguishing himself and plays the better under the greater pressure."
[472] T. B. Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases (London 1883), pp. 310-318.
[473] In his Maladies de la Volonté, p. 77.
[474] For other cases of 'impulsive insanity,' see H. Maudsley's Responsibility in Mental Disease, pp. 133-170, and Forbes Winslow's Obscure Diseases of the Mind and Brain, chapters vi, vii, viii.
[475] Quoted by G. Burr, in an article on the Insanity of Inebriety in the N. Y. Psychological and Medico-Legal Journal, Dec. 1874.
[476] Autobiography, Howells' edition (1877), pp. 192-6.