Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/333

Rh are controlled normally by the facial nerve. To read the face is to read the soul, so far as the latter can express itself, or repress its expression, in any physical way. The whole history of this case reverses the normal history of the original development. Instead of the power of control being more and more acquired by experience of muscular and tactual sensations, and of the results produced by the external or emotional stimulation of these sensations, we have the increasing effect of the deliberate and persistent voluntary attempt to regain control, with its advancing degrees of success and increased differentiation; and last of all, and most imperfectly, the resumption of non-volitional motor functions under the stimulation of sensation and emotion. All this certainly looks like the picture of a mind learning how to use a tool, the construction of which has been suddenly so changed as to render it, for the time being, substantially a different tool. This, so far as the cerebral functions are concerned. The transmission of the motor impulses, when once started from the cortical centers, by new and unaccustomed tracts, is an affair of comparatively little significance either to physiology or to psychology.

In this psycho-physical progress, which I will call the evolution of a more highly differentiated self-control, all the various familiar forms of functioning, and laws of functioning, when seen from the psychological point of view, are apparent. The ease and ability increase with practise; the motor results are in a measure cumulative; the different forms of sensation-experiences inhibit or supplement and assist each other; and the effects of fatigue make themselves manifest. Such an evolution does not, however, seem explicable as nothing more than an increasing complexity, ease and precision of sensory-motor reflexes; although it has all the marks of dependence upon such a mechanical basis. To speak figuratively, what takes place in such cases of nerve anastomosis can not be completely and satisfactorily explained in terms that are applicable to a nervous mechanism, however complex, or complexly and mysteriously subject to improvements of a mechanical sort. An agency, that must be described in terms of ideation, apperception of an end to be attained, and purposeful volition consciously directed toward that end, seems also necessary to account for the whole result. If involuntary emotion and externally originated sensory-stimuli were ihe means of evoking and educating the motor organism, in the first instance; it is, on the other hand, conscious and purposeful voluntary effort which is the most important factor in the recovery of function and new education of the motor organism. And how astonishingly complex and even antecedently improbable, we might almost say, are the resulting histological and functional changes in the organism brought about by repeated volitions, our conjectural analysis of this case has suggested, if it has not made clear.