Section 105. A vast amount of our activities are reflex, and in such action an efferent stimulus follows an afferent promptly and quite mechanically. It is only where efferent stimuli do not immediately become entirely transmuted into outwardly moving impulses that mental action comes in and an animal feels. There appears to be a direct relation between sensation and motion. For instance, the shrieks and other instinctive violent motions produced by pain, "shunt off" a certain amount of nervous impression that would otherwise register itself as additional painful sensation. Similarly most women and children understand the comfort of a "good cry," and its benefit in shifting off a disagreeable mental state. Section 106. The mind receives and stores impressions, and these accumulated experiences are the basis of memory, comparison, imagination, thought, and apparently spontaneous will. Voluntary actions differ from reflex by the interposition of this previously stored factor. For instance, when a frog sees a small object in front of him, that may or may not be an edible insect, the direct visual impression does not directly determine his subsequent action. It revives a number of previous experiences, an image already stored of similar insects and associated with painful or pleasurable gustatory experiences. With these arise an emotional effect of desire or repulsion which, passes into action of capture or the reverse. Section 107. Voluntary actions may, by constant repetition, become quasi-reflex in character. The intellectual phase is abbreviated away. Habits are once voluntary and deliberated actions becoming mechanical in this way, and slipping out of the sphere of mind. For instance, many of the detailed movements of writing and walking are performed without any attention to the details. An excessive concentration of the attention upon one thing leads to absent-mindedness, and to its consequent absurdities of inappropriate, because imperfectly acquired, reflexes. Section 108. This fluctuating scope of mind should be remembered, more especially when we are considering the probable mental states of the lower animals. An habitual or reflex action may have all the outward appearance of deliberate adjustment. We cannot tell in any particular case how far the mental comes in, or whether it comes in at all. Seeing that in our own case consciousness does not enter into our commonest and most necessary actions, into breathing and digestion, for instance, and scarcely at all in the details of such acts as walking and talking we might infer that nature was economical in its use, and that in the case of such an animal as the Rabbit, which follows a very limited routine, and in which scarcely any versatility in emergencies is evident, it must be relatively inconsiderable. Perhaps after all, pain is not scattered so needlessly and lavishly throughout the world as the enemies of the vivisectionist would have us believe. 7. _The Nervous System_