Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/65

49 aimed at persists, and, through its contrast with the partial motor quale, emphasizes and reinforces the sense of incompleteness. That is to say, one is continually imaging the speck as having some particular form,—an oval or an angular form; as having a certain nature,—an ink-spot, a fly-speck. Then this image is as continually interfered with by the sensations of motor adjustment coming to consciousness by themselves. Each experience breaks into, and breaks up, the other before it has attained fulness. Let the image of a five-sided ink-spot be acquiesced in apart from the motor adjustment (in other words, let one pass into the state of reverie), or let the 'muscular' sensations be given complete sway by themselves (as when one begins to study them in his capacity as psychologist), and all sense of effort disappears. It is the rivalry, with the accompanying disagreeable tone due to failure of habit, that constitutes the sense of effort.

It will be useful to apply the terms of this analysis to some attendant phenomena of effort. First, it enables us to account for the growing sense of effort with fatigue, without having to resort to a set of conceptions lying outside the previously used ideas. The sense of fatigue increases effort, just because it marks the emergence into consciousness of a distinct new set of sensations which resist absorption into, or fusion with, the dominant images of the current habit or purpose. Upon the basis of other theories of effort, fatigue increases sense of effort because of sheer exhaustion; upon this theory, because of the elements introduced which distract attention. Other theories, in other words, have to fall back upon an extrapsychical factor, and something which is heterogeneous with the other factors concerned. Moreover, they fail to account for the fact that if the feeling of fatigue is surrendered to, it ceases to be disagreeable, and may become a delicious languor.

In a similar way certain facts connected with sense of effort, as related to the mastery of novel acts, may be explained. Take the alternation of ridiculous excess of effort, with total collapse of effort in learning to ride a bicycle. Before one