Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/517

 504 H. MATJDSLEY : the pain, might even press its hand against the poker, because of the absence of the requisite education-developed organic machinery ; or a person dead-drunk, because of the loss of the power of fit reaction which goes along with the loss of sensibility. 1 The fit self-protective movement is made because the impression is injurious to the organism, inimical to its life, the pain being a sort of outcry of danger and the accompaniment of a capacity and impulse to select and put into instant action a purposive function of escape that has become automatic. But the very same movement might, if rightly stimulated, be executed without conscious- ness ; for if the physiological experimenter were able to select out exactly and put into isolated action (which in such a fine and complex nervous structure it is impossible for him to do mechanically) the proper nerve-tracts subserving the irritating stimulus and the responsive movement, he would produce the same effect in a person unconscious of any pain. The pain therefore has no part in the actual circuit of work done, is not cause or energy, is only a neces- sary accompaniment of it. Let us now suppose a person to do the same act voluntarily to touch a poker not hot and instantly to withdraw his hand as if it were red-hot. There can be no doubt that just as exactly as he succeeds in imitating the act just so exactly does he put into action the same nervous machinery. But what is the addition to the affair ? Not the addition of any abstract consciousness and will, for the pain of the first affair was a consciousness, but the addition of another and higher kind of consciousness and energy. And what else is that addition but the addition of the con- current activities of other nervous tracts and their inter- action or communication with the nervous tract subserving the so-called sensory reflex movement. Were this move- ment to fail of its instant self-protective effect (which it might well do if it did not take instant effect before the disorganising action signalled by the pain had gone too far) the supplementary function of these other tracts would in 1 A person drunk, but not quite dead-drunk, might do it automatically when he could not do it voluntarily, because his lower nerve-tracts might remain capable of function when the supreme tracts were paralysed by the alcoholic poison. We observe a remarkable illustration of the same kind sometimes in the case of a person under the influence of chloroform who, undergoing a surgical operation, writhes and yells as if he were suffering the most horrible pain, but does not remember, after the operation, anything about it, declaring that he felt not the least pain. His higher nerve-tracts were paralysed by the chloroform, but its effect had not gone so deeply as to paralyse the lower tracts.