Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/845

 REVIEWS 829

will sow the seeds of chorea, or aggravate predispositions to it, now again comes a greatly increased danger, hardly existing from eight to twelve, that overprecision, especially if fundamental activities are neglected, will bring

nervous strain and stunting precocity Periods of increase in strength

alternate with those of control, and perhaps at certain stages have an almost inverse ratio. This is of the greatest significance for motor education, suggesting that for a few years the stress should incline to the larger sthenic or coarser strength-forms of development, and that precision should have less relative emphasis. Motor activities involving accuracy, which may be accentuated during years that precede puberty, should now yield somewhat to those involving fundamental rather than accessory development.

(Physiologists distinguish between fundamental and accessory muscles. The former are the great trunk and limb muscles, those muscles which make possible "movements of the trunk and large joints, neck, back, hips, shoulders, knees, and elbows." The latter, or accessory, muscles are " those of the hand, tongue, face, and articulatory organs." These are smaller and more numerous, and their functions " develop later in life and represent a higher stand- point of evolution." The author significantly connects the function of these accessory muscles with the essential nature of consciousness. Here we see the "organic thinker" at his best. But even here his thinking is not organic enough. He says that these smaller muscles "are chiefly associated with psychic activity, which plays upon them by incessantly changing their tensions, if not causing actual movement." But this is only a half-hearted recognition of the real significance of the function of these finer muscles. Ribot and Maudsley were much nearer the truth when they said that attention and thought is control of the muscles. Mind does not "play upon" these muscles. Consciousness just consists of the tensions and mutual inhibitions of muscles, and especially of these smaller accessory muscles, because these are concerned in the finer adjustments of manual dexterity and laryngeal articulation so characteristic of intelligence in its higher stages. Dr. Hall says that "these smaller muscles might almost be called the organs of thought." We would amend this by confidently asserting that they are the organs of thought, and alter his statement to read : " Not even the brain itself is more clearly and immediately an organ of thought than are these muscles and their activity." Indeed, the author's own conception of the nature of consciousness supports this view, when he says that "the purest thought, if true, is only action repressed to be ripened to more practical form," or when he says, " sanity is preserved by an