into the operations of organic life, and if they must often have to put up with a guess concerning the multitude of connecting links, but also, and more frequently, fail to settle the question whether there might not have been a still more appropriate course than the one actually chosen. Every perceived adaptation is proof positive of psychical action not to be invalidated, but a thousand ill-understood connections of cause and effect can afford no negative argument against the existence of a psychical basis. This is by no means, however, the state of the case, but in almost all instances where we see a manifestly unsuitable action on the part of the organism, we can render a satisfactory account of the phenomenon. The spontaneous origin of disease, which might also have been included in the list, has been already dealt with. A great number of other cases are accounted for as follows:—The means offered for getting rid of the disturbance do not conform to the intentions of the organism, because disturbances from other quarters prevent this, so that by a second malady the efforts to suppress the first are rendered fruitless. This case is of very frequent occurrence, only it is often difficult to discover the second disturbing cause, which may be very deep-seated, and at the same time be very insignificant in itself. In the last resort it is then always again the insufficient power of the individual will (in the present instance in setting aside the second disturbance), whereby the means applied are misdirected, and do not lead to the goal. A special case of insufficient power is when, on a particularly intense strain in a certain direction, the will is not able to keep within definite bounds. Thus, e.g., in the healing of a broken bone, when an active tendency to the formation of bone is required, the surrounding portions of muscle and sinew mostly become ossified also; but in that case the organism afterwards. repairs its error as far as possible; thus, in the present instance, the ossified contiguous parts are reduced after healing to their normal condition.

How limited is the power of the individual will is also shown by the following example:-During pregnancy, when the unconscious will must be concentrated on the formation of the child, occasionally osseous fractures will not at all heal, whilst after a successful delivery they heal quite well.

The last possible objection would be this: The appropriate reaction follows on every disturbance in virtue of a mechanism provided for the creature, without the participation of the individual pysche. Whoever has followed my exposition thus far will require no refutation of this. We have seen the impossibility of a material mechanism; that of a psychical one is evident to any one who weighs the endless multiplicity of the disturbances which occur, and considers that the function of each single organ, as of the whole body, is no other than that of ceaselessly warding off and neutralising approaching disturbances, and that only in this way is existence maintained. Accordingly, if the fitness of these compensations for the purpose of self-preservation be once granted, it is impossible to avoid the idea of an individual providence, for it can only be the individual itself that conceives the purpose according to which it acts. The truth which emerges so clearly in this and the foregoing chapter cannot fail to reinforce the refutation of the same objection in the case of Instinct, since we have already recognised a fundamental resemblance. It would be folly to suppose a special instinctive faculty, a special faculty for reflex movement, a special faculty for the vis medicatrix, since in all these phenomena we have perceived nothing more than an adaptation of means to an end unconsciously presented and willed, and it is only the different kinds of exciting external circumstances that call forth different classes of reactions, whereby, however, the differences are not so pronounced that they do not shade into one another. That the healing operations in the organism are not results of conscious thinking and willing will be doubted by nobody who reflects how

small a share his consciousness has had in the healing of a wound or a fracture; nay, the most powerful curative effects take place at the time when consciousness is as far as possible in abeyance, as in deep sleep. To which may be added, that the organic functions, so far as they are at all dependent on nerves, are regulated by sympathetic nerve-fibres, which are not directly subject to the conscious will, but are innervated by the ganglionic centres from which they spring. If, nevertheless, there reigns in the organic healing functions so wonderful a harmony tending to a single goal, this can never be explained by the material inter-communication of these different ganglia, but only by the unity of the over-ruling principle, the Unconscious.

VII.

THE INDIRECT INFLUENCE ON ORGANIC FUNCTIONS OF CONSCIOUS PSYCHICAL ACTIVITY.

1. THE INFLUENCE OF THE CONSCIOUS WILL.

(a.) Muscular Contraction.

MUSCULAR Contraction is manifestly by far the most important organic function dependent on conscious volition, for it is that whereby we move and act on the external world, through which we communicate in speech and writing. It takes place through the influence of the motor nerves, by a nerve-current flowing from centre to periphery, a current which is evidently related to the electrical and chemical streams, as we find them to be convertible, and of whose intensity we can form no mean idea when we see the contracted muscles of the athlete, attached to the long lever arms of the limbs, moreover, sporting with hundredweights, and then consider what colossal galvanic currents would be required to lift such a load with an electro-magnet. We have already seen that any muscular movement is explicable only by the repeated intervention of unconscious volition and thought, because otherwise it would not be apparent, how the motor impulse could affect the part of the nervous centre answering to this consciously represented movement rather than any other. We have further seen that the more immediate centres for most movements lie in the spinal cord and medulla oblongata, and that these movements are there so determined

and ordered that they are to be looked upon as reflexes of these centres, occasioned by the stimulus of a relatively small number of fibres proceeding from the cerebrum, so that the first motor impulse must be referred to the central endings of these fibres in the cerebral hemispheres. It may well be that several of such reflex actions take place in different nerve-centres more and more remote from the brain before a complex movement is executed, that, e.g., in walking, at first some few fibres carry the impulse over from the cerebrum, where the conscious will to walk arises, to the cerebellum (the organ which is said to coordinate the larger motor groups), that then from there a larger number of fibres carry forward the impulses to different centres of the spinal cord, and finally to the crural nerves. On occasion of every such reflexion the unconscious willing and conceiving of the specific motor instinct of the particular centre chimes in, and thus it becomes explicable how such complex movements run their course appropriately and orderly without any mental effort whatsoever. In every centre the impulse is felt as stimulus and converted into a new impulse, so that in the strictest sense we can only speak of the motor nervecurrent from the last centre.

The question now arises, how the will is able to produce the innervating current. We can only fall back on the analogies of the related and (physically) better known currents, and on the a priori suggestion, that the entire apparatus of the motor nervous system has probably been inserted in the organism with the object of making it possible for the will to produce the necessary mechanical effects with the smallest possible mechanical effort; in other words, that the motor nervous system is a mechanical power like the winds, or more truly as the wallshattering ordnance, to which the individual man has only to apply the match. To produce mechanical motion without mechanical energy is impossible, but the energy which ushers in the movement may be reduced to a