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Page 41
The fact is that there is no sort of consciousness whatever, be it
sensation, feeling, or idea, which does not directly and of itself tend
to discharge into some motor effect. The motor effect need not always be
an outward stroke of behavior. It may be only an alteration of the
heart-beats or breathing, or a modification in the distribution of
blood, such as blushing or turning pale; or else a secretion of tears,
or what not. But, in any case, it is there in some shape when any
consciousness is there; and a belief as fundamental as any in modern
psychology is the belief at last attained that conscious processes of
any sort, conscious processes merely as such, _must_ pass over into
motion, open or concealed.
The least complicated case of this tendency is the case of a mind
possessed by only a single idea. If that idea be of an object connected
with a native impulse, the impulse will immediately proceed to
discharge. If it be the idea of a movement, the movement will occur.
Such a case of action from a single idea has been distinguished from
more complex cases by the name of 'ideo-motor' action, meaning action
without express decision or effort. Most of the habitual actions to
which we are trained are of this ideo-motor sort. We perceive, for
instance, that the door is open, and we rise and shut it; we perceive
some raisins in a dish before us, and extend our hand and carry one of
them to our mouth without interrupting the conversation; or, when lying
in bed, we suddenly think that we shall be late for breakfast, and
instantly we get up with no particular exertion or resolve. All the
ingrained procedures by which life is carried on--the manners and
customs, dressing and undressing, acts of salutation, etc.--are executed
in this semi-automatic way unhesitatingly and efficiently, the very
outermost margin of consciousness seeming to be concerned in them,
while the focus may be occupied with widely different things.
But now turn to a more complicated case. Suppose two thoughts to be in
the mind together, of which one, A, taken alone, would discharge itself
in a certain action, but of which the other, B, suggests an action of a
different sort, or a consequence of the first action calculated to make
us shrink. The psychologists now say that the second idea, B, will
probably arrest or _inhibit_ the motor effects of the first idea, A. One
word, then, about 'inhibition' in general, to make this particular case
more clear.
One of the most interesting discoveries of physiology was the discovery,
made simultaneously in France and Germany fifty years ago, that nerve
currents do not only start muscles into action, but may check action
already going on or keep it from occurring as it otherwise might.
_Nerves of arrest_ were thus distinguished alongside of motor nerves.
The pneumogastric nerve, for example, if stimulated, arrests the
movements of the heart: the splanchnic nerve arrests those of the
intestines, if already begun. But it soon appeared that this was too
narrow a way of looking at the matter, and that arrest is not so much
the specific function of certain nerves as a general function which any
part of the nervous system may exert upon other parts under the
appropriate conditions. The higher centres, for example, seem to exert a
constant inhibitive influence on the excitability of those below. The
reflexes of an animal with its hemispheres wholly or in part removed
become exaggerated. You all know that common reflex in dogs, whereby, if
you scratch the animal's side, the corresponding hind leg will begin to
make scratching movements, usually in the air. Now in dogs with
mutilated hemispheres this scratching reflex is so incessant that, as
Goltz first described them, the hair gets all worn off their sides. In
idiots, the functions of the hemispheres being largely in abeyance, the
lower impulses, not inhibited, as they would be in normal human beings,
often express themselves in most odious ways. You know also how any
higher emotional tendency will quench a lower one. Fear arrests
appetite, maternal love annuls fear, respect checks sensuality, and the
like; and in the more subtile manifestations of the moral life, whenever
an ideal stirring is suddenly quickened into intensity, it is as if the
whole scale of values of our motives changed its equilibrium. The force
of old temptations vanishes, and what a moment ago was impossible is now
not only possible, but easy, because of their inhibition. This has been
well called the 'expulsive power of the higher emotion.'
It is easy to apply this notion of inhibition to the case of our
ideational processes. I am lying in bed, for example, and think it is
time to get up; but alongside of this thought there is present to my
mind a realization of the extreme coldness of the morning and the
pleasantness of the warm bed. In such a situation the motor consequences
of the first idea are blocked; and I may remain for half an hour or more
with the two ideas oscillating before me in a kind of deadlock, which is
what we call the state of hesitation or deliberation. In a case like
this the deliberation can be resolved and the decision reached in either
of two ways:--
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