"Passive movements could be imprinted on all the extremities to the
greatest extent, without attracting the patient's notice. Only in
violent forced hyperextension of the joints, especially of the knees,
there arose a dull vague feeling of strain, but this was seldom
precisely localized. We have often, after bandaging the eyes of the
patient, carried him about the room, laid him on a table, given to his
arms and legs the most fantastic and apparently the most inconvenient
attitudes without his having a suspicion of it. The expression of
astonishment in his face, when all at once the removal of the
handkerchief revealed his situation, is indescribable in words. Only
when his head was made to hang away down he immediately spoke of
dizziness, but could not assign its ground. Later he sometimes inferred
from the sounds connected with the manipulation that something special
was being done with him.... He had no feelings of muscular fatigue. If,
with his eyes shut, we told him to raise his arm and to keep it up, he
did so without trouble. After one or two minutes, however, the arm began
to tremble and sink without his being aware of it. He asserted still his
ability to keep it up.... Passively holding still his fingers did not
affect him. He thought constantly that he opened and shut his hand,
whereas it was really fixed."
_No third kind of idea is called for._ We need, then, when we perform a
movement, either a kinæsthetic or a remote idea of which special
movement it is to be. In addition to this it has often been supposed
that we need an _idea of the amount of innervation_ required for the
muscular contraction. The discharge from the motor centre into the motor
nerve is supposed to give a sensation _sui generis_, opposed to all our
other sensations. These accompany incoming currents, whilst that, it is
said, accompanies an outgoing current, and no movement is supposed to be
totally defined in our mind, unless an anticipation of this feeling
enter into our idea. The movement's degree of strength, and the effort
required to perform it, are supposed to be specially revealed by the
feeling of innervation. Many authors deny that this feeling exists, and
the proofs given of its existence are certainly insufficient.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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