Movement and Mental Imagery: Outlines of a Motor Theory of the Complexer Mental Processes.

It is not surprising, therefore, that since psychology undertook to call itself a science, there has existed a strong desire to connect the facts of the mind with the facts of bodily move- ment.There are even psychologists, who, impatient at the difficulties of showing the relation between mental phenomena xii the dismissal of the image from psychology."But we have just as good reason for denying the existence of all conscious processes whatever as we have for denying the existence of mental images.An outsider, studying merely my bodily move- ments, would be quite as unable to explain why a certain vapor should affect me with the peculiar experience of the smell of kerosene, or why certain ether vibrations should make me see red, when red does not look at all like a vibration, as he would ) excitation, and the attempt to utilize, as actual causal mechanisms, certain motor processes which have been neglected by j psychological theory as mere incidental phenomena.The most important of these neglected motor processes are the slight actual muscular contractions which accompany all attentive consciousness and are the basis, I believe, of all associative activity.Another motor process to which I have assigned a leading function is the attitude of activity or strain characteristic of strong attention, which I believe actually constitutes the essence of a problem idea. XVThe first step, evidently, towards working out the hypothe- sis that all association is association between movements is to describe the association of movements.And therefore the first chapter will briefly survey the way in which movements are combined associatively.