what either of these things are. We learn all our possibilities by the
way of experience. When a particular movement, having once occurred in a
random, reflex, or involuntary way, has left an image of itself in the
memory, then the movement can be desired again, and deliberately willed.
But it is impossible to see how it could be willed before.
_A supply of ideas of the various movements that are possible, left in
the memory by experiences of their involuntary performance, is thus the
first prerequisite of the voluntary life._
=Two Kinds of Ideas of Movement.=--Now these ideas may be either
_resident_ or _remote_. That is, they may be of the movement as it
feels, when taking place, in the moving parts; or they may be of the
movement as it feels in some other part of the body which it affects
(strokes, presses, scratches, etc.), or as it sounds, or as it looks.
The resident sensations in the parts that move have been called
_kinæsthetic_ feelings, the memories of them are kinæsthetic ideas. It
is by these kinæsthetic sensations that we are made conscious of
_passive movements_--movements communicated to our limbs by others. If
you lie with closed eyes, and another person noiselessly places your arm
or leg in any arbitrarily chosen attitude, you receive a feeling of what
attitude it is, and can reproduce it yourself in the arm or leg of the
opposite side. Similarly a man waked suddenly from sleep in the dark is
aware of how he finds himself lying. At least this is what happens in
normal cases. But when the feelings of passive movement as well as all
the other feelings of a limb are lost, we get such results as are given
in the following account by Prof. A. Strümpell of his wonderful
anæsthetic boy, whose only sources of feeling were the right eye and the
left ear:[53]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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