ABSTRACT
The psychic operation which is to be resolved into an act of will is, then, in itself only the second bar of a movement already begun. It is only the regular expression of the human personality, seized on, and impressed by an old or recent excitation from the external world, and carrying back to the external world the different states of its sensibility in emotion, in the form of motor manifestations. In the first series of facts, when the excitations derived from the external world are not directly reflected outwards—when, under the influence of one cause or another, the primary impression remains confined within our own organism, it dies away there, and the reverberation which results extends to a. greater or lesser distance. The nervous discharge of the process, arrested in its course, reacts upon one region or another of vegetative life, and this depends upon the closeness of the sympathetic links uniting each of these with the sensorium.
