Body and mind : an inquiry into their connection and mutual influence, specially in reference to mental disorders being the Gulstonian lectures for 1870, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians with appendix / by Henry Maudsley.
- Henry Maudsley
- Date:
- 1870
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Body and mind : an inquiry into their connection and mutual influence, specially in reference to mental disorders being the Gulstonian lectures for 1870, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians with appendix / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.
43/214 (page 25)
![I.] MOTOR INTUITIONS. I have already shown this in respect of motor functions, by exhibiting how entirely dependent for its expression will is upon the organized mechanism of the motor centres—how, in effecting voluntary movements, it pre- supposes the appropriate education of the motor centres. Few persons, perhaps, consider what a wonderful art speech is, or even remember that it is an art which we acquire. But it actually costs us a great deal of pains to learn to speak; all the language which an infant has is a cry; and it is only because we begin to learn to talk when we are very young, and are constantly practising, that we forget how specially we have had to educate our motor centres of speech. Here, however, we come to another pregnant consideration: the acquired faculty of the educated motor centre is not only a necessary agency in the performance of a voluntary act, but I maintain that it positively enters as a mental element into the composition of the definite volition ; that, in fact, the specific motor faculty not only acts downwards upon the motor nerves, thus executing the movement, but also acts upwards upon the mind-centres, thereby giving to consciousness the conception of the suitable movement— the appropriate motor intuition. It is certain that, in order to execute consciously a voluntary act, we must have in the mind a conception of the aim or purpose of the act. The will cannot act upon the separate muscles, it can only determine the result desired J and thereupon the combined contraction, in due force and rapidity, of the separate muscles takes place in a way that we have no consciousness of, and accomplishes the act. The](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20407750_0043.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
