Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/532

 520 CHARLES MERCIER : know nothing of the physiological processes which eventuate in bodily movements, and to whom the movement of a limb is the first thing that happens in an act, the feeling that corresponds with the incipient stage of the act, and occurs before the movement, will appear to occur previous to and altogether apart from the act. Many things concur to con- firm this notion of the separateness of this portion of the feeling from the act with which it corresponds. For every case in which the nervous discharge attains a tension sufficient to overcome the resistance of the outgoing channels and to reach the muscles, several instances occur in which a less powerful discharge occurs from which 110 movement results. In such cases a mental state arises which we call an idea of the movement, and which is precisely similar, save only that it is of inferior intensity or vividness, to the feeling corresponding with the incipient stage of an act. Such a feeling, since it is not associated with an act, is looked on as quite apart from action, and helps to confirm the notion of the independence of the intenser feeling also. Again, when the passage from the nerve-centres to the muscles is interrupted, as it often is in everyone's experience, from temporary pressure on nerve or artery, an act requiring those muscles will stop short at its initiatory stage. Since the nerve-currents do not reach the muscles there will be no movements ; but since the nerve-centre discharges with the requisite energy, and the first stage of the act occurs, the feeling appropriate to that stage will also occur. Further- more, although this feeling is but an intenser form of the mental state which we call an idea of a movement, yet from this state it is sharply distinguished not by its intensity, which is a matter of degree and therefore does not admit of sharp distinction, but by its association with action. For while the intenser feeling always immediately precedes a movement, the fainter feeling never does. Often two or more of these fainter feelings arise in succession or in alter- nation, but they are not associated with movement until one of them obtains preponderance and emerges into the state of greater intensity, and this is the prelude to the corre- sponding movement. From these conditions it results that the feeling which corresponds with the incipient stage of an act is regarded as distinct on the one hand from the fainter feelings which it resembles, and on the other from the act with whose initiation it corresponds. To those who do not know of the existence of the incipient stage of an act, and who look upon the muscular movement as its earliest be- ginning, the feeling that accompanies its incipient stage will