Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/531

 A CLASSIFICATION OF FEELINGS, H. 519 can be founded upon them. It is evident that we must look for some principle, quite different from those that have been found of service in dividing the environmentally-initiated actions, to serve as a basis for classifying those which are initiated by the organism. Such a principle is found in the which these actions go through. Expressed in terms of the adjustment of the organism to the environment, an act is a movement of the organism adjusted to an end (Spencer), and it is with this movement thus adjusted that the feeling corresponds. Regarded physiologically, an act begins as a nervous process. It is first of all an energising of the highest nervous centres or some of them. Although such a process is of course not itself an act, and although it may exist without the occurrence of any consequent act, yet whenever an act is performed such a process is a necessary antecedent is the first stage of the continuous process which in its entirety constitutes the physiology of the act. The feeling, which is the state of the organism that corresponds with the action of the organ- ism on the environment, begins when this action begins, that is to say, it begins with the nervous process that even- tuates in an act. But we have seen that not every nervous process does eventuate in movement. There is therefore a difference between the feeling that we are now considering that which accompanies the earliest stage of the initiation of an action and the feeling of purely intellectual exertion. This difference is on the physiological side a difference in the momentum of the discharged energy. If the energising of the nerve-regions concerned becomes so active that the liberated energy has sufficient momentum to overcome the resistance of the nerve-paths and to reach the muscles and set them in action, then there is a feeling of initiated action ; but if this degree of activity is not attained, this feeling does not arise. iSTow the passage of the nerve-current from the highest nerve-regions to the muscles is not- instantaneous. It occupies time. Between the attainment of the requisite tension or momentum on the part of the nerve-process and the resulting muscular contraction there is a brief but ap- preciable interval. During this interval there is no move- ment of the organism, but the act is already virtually begun ; and in correspondence with this initiatory stage of the act there arises a feeling, which is part of the feeling appropriate to and corresponding with the act, and yet has a certain difference from the rest of the feeling which corresponds with the remainder of the act with that part in which the movement from incipient has become actual. To those who