Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/528

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reflex or involuntary movement of that muscle must be experienced in association with the sensations from the near-by muscles over which voluntary control has already been gained. He says: "The contraction could not be made voluntarily, not even after it was repeated (artificially of course) a sufficient number of times thoroughly to impress the sensations and definitely to fix the association between the muscle sensation and the visual impression of it." (pp. 499-500.) This appears to imply, that both "resident" and "remote" (visual) sensation were given the reagent without his being able to make the movement voluntarily.

Bair explains that getting control of such a muscle means three things: ( i ) Producing the movement accidentally through the spread of excessive energy into outlying muscles not yet under voluntary control thus giving a new muscle sensation, or sensation from a muscle from which sensations have not hitherto been experienced. (2) It means the association of this "new" sensation with sensations from muscles already under control. (3) The dissociation of this sensation from the complex of sensations in which it originally arose, so as to be caught separately by attention.

If one distinguishes between sensation and image, a distinction which certainly is not one merely of words, then the findings of Bair's study do not lend unqualified support to the kinaesthetic interpretation of voluntary movement, which explains the whole process in terms of memories or images, "resident" or "remote," of movements which took place involuntarily, or at least non-voluntarily. Bair shows that the memory, or image, of how it feels or looks to have the ear moved is not sufficient to bring about its voluntary movement.

A third experimental study with important bearings upon this question is Woodworth's investigation of "The Cause of a Voluntary Movement." (Studies in Philosophy and Psychology, Garman Memorial Volume, pp. 351-392.) Woodworth's subjects were required to make various movements, some of which, as Angell points out, were probably "too well mastered and too habitual to throw fairly into the foreground the sensory-ideational elements emphasized in gaining control of them." ("Studies in Psy., Journal of Phil., Psy., and Sd. Methods, Vol. 3. p. 241.) It is, however, to be noticed that Angell's use of the term "sensory-ideational" implies a failure to distinguish between sensation and image, a distinction of which Woodworth makes use and which has important bearings upon the whole problem.

Out of 128 single introspections Woodworth summarizes the imagery as follows: 27 reported kinsesthetic, 27 reported