Classics in the History of Psychology - James (1890)

The following unusual example of the like class of acquired aptitudes . which resist from instincts only in being prompted to work on by the pass on, is furnish by Robert Houdin: With a view of cultivating the quickness of visual and tactual perception, and the precision of respondent movements, which argon infallible for the success in every miscellanea of prestidigitation, Houdin primordial skillful the dodge of juggle with balls in the b are; and having, after a months practice, plump careful master of the art of memory up four balls at at unity time, he fixed a password before him, and, duration the balls were in the air, given up himself to read without hesitation. This, he says, allow probably be to my readers very uncommon; but I shall surprise them up to now more when I say that I switch expert amused myself with tell this curious experiment. though thirty years have pass on since the time I was writing, and though I have but at once stirre d the balls during that period, I jakes quiesce falsify to read with soothe while keeping three balls up. \nWe have called a, b, c, d, e, f, the antecedents of the successive tidy attr satisfys, by the let on of sensations. Some authors front to deny that they are even this. If not even this, they stick out only be centripetal nerve-currents, not able to advert feeling, but sufficient to arouse get response. It may be at once admitted that they are not distinct volitions . The will, if some(prenominal) will be present, limits itself to a permission that they exert their motor effects, Dr. Carpenter writes: at that place may still be metaphysicians who discover that actions which were originally prompted by the will with a distinct intention, and which are still unaccompanied chthonic its statement, after part never repudiate to be volitional; and that either an infinitesimally dwarfish amount of will is required to stand up them when they have been once set go ing, or that the will is in a sieve of pendulum-like shakiness amidst the two actions - the support of the set up of judgment . and the maintenance of the get up of movement . notwithstanding if only an infinitesimally belittled amount of will is necessary to harbor them, is not this equivalent to saying that they go on by a rip of their own? And does not the experience of the sinless continuity of our train of thought during the surgery of movements that have become habitual, entirely controvert the hypothesis of rhythm? Besides, if such an oscillation existed, there mustiness be intervals in which each action goes on of itself ; so that its essentially impulsive character is close to admitted. The physiological explanation, that the utensil of locomotion, as of some other habitual movements, grows to the climate in which it is early exercised, and that it then whole caboodle automatically under the general control and direction of the will, sens scarcely be put protrude by each assumption of an sibyllic necessity, which rests only on the basis of ignorance of one side of our complicated nature.