The Story of the Mind | Page 9

is therefore only a complex and very highly conscious
case of the general law of Motor Suggestion; it is the form which
suggested action takes on when Apperception is at its highest level.
The converse of Suggestion is also true--that we can not perform an
action without having in the mind at the time the appropriate thought,

or image, or memory to suggest the action. This dependence of action
upon the thought which the mind has at the time is conclusively shown
in certain patients having partial paralysis. These patients find that
when the eyes are bandaged they can not use their limbs, and it is
simply because they can not realize without seeing the limb how it
would feel to move it; but open the eyes and let them see the limb--then
they move it freely. A patient can not speak when the cortex of the
brain is injured in the particular spot which is used in remembering
how the words feel or sound when articulated. Many such cases lead to
the general position that for each of our intentional actions we must
have some way of thinking about the action, of remembering how it
feels, looks, etc.; we must have something in mind equivalent to the
experience of the movement. This is called the principle of Kinæsthetic
Equivalents, an expression which loses its formidable sound when we
remember that "kinæsthetic" means having the feeling of movement; so
the principle expresses the truth that we must in every case have some
thought or mental picture in mind which is equivalent to the feeling of
the movement we desire to make; if not, we can not succeed in making
it.
What we mean by the "freedom" of the will is not ability to do anything
without thinking, but ability to think all the alternatives together and to
act on this larger thought. Free action is the fullest expression of
thought and of the Self which thinks it.
It is interesting to observe the child getting his Equivalents day by day.
He can not perform a new movement simply by wishing to do so; he
has no Equivalents in his mind to proceed upon. But as he learns the
action, gradually striking the proper movements one by one--oftenest
by imitation, as we will see later on--he stores the necessary
Equivalents up in his memory, and afterward only needs to think how
the movements feel or look, or how words sound, to be able to make
the movements or speak the words forthwith.
III. Introspection finds another great class of conditions in experience,
again on the receptive side--conditions which convert the mind from
the mere theatre of indifferent changes into the vitally interested,

warmly intimate thing which our mental life is to each of us. This is the
sphere of Feeling. We may see without more ado that while we are
receiving sensations and thoughts and suggestions, and acting upon
them in the variety of ways already pointed out, we ourselves are not
indifferent spectators of this play, this come-and-go of processes. We
are directly implicated; indeed, the very sense of a self, an ego, a
me-and-mine, in each consciousness, arises from the fact that all this
come-and-go is a personal growth. The mind is not a mere machine
doing what the laws of its action prescribe. We find that nothing
happens which does not affect the mind itself for better or for worse,
for richer or for poorer, for pleasure or for pain; and there spring up a
series of attitudes of the mind itself, according as it is experiencing or
expecting to experience what to it is good or bad. This is, then, the
great meaning of Feeling; it is the sense in the mind that it is itself in
some way influenced for good or for ill by what goes on within it. It
stands midway between thought and action. We feel with reference to
what we think, and we act because we feel. All action is guided by
feeling.
Feeling shows two well-marked characters: first, the Excitement of
taking a positive attitude; and, second, the Pleasure or Pain that goes
with it.
Here, again, it may suffice to distinguish the stages which arise as we
go from the higher to the lower, from the life of Sensation and
Perception up to that of Thought. This was our method in both of the
other phases of the mental life--Knowledge and Action. Doing this,
therefore, in the case of Feeling also, we find different terms applied to
the different phases of feeling. In the lowest sort of mental life, as we
may suppose the helpless newborn child to have it, and as we also think
it exists in certain low forms of animal life, feeling is not much more
than Pleasures and