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claimed, that henceforward my inspirations are all voluntary, each preceded by an act of mind? I think not. The improved process is as automatic as the previous one, and no more requires subconscious mental acts for its explanation.

There are still other physical movements more constantly voluntary, more rarely involuntary. We thus speak of them as voluntary acts, and seem to regard them as under the exclusive impulse of the will. There is no good reason for this. The fact that I walk whither I will, and modify my movement as I will, is not a sufficient reason for requiring a distinct, mental act, conscious or unconscious, back of each muscular movement made in passing over each rod of the road I am pursuing. The will, as it were, by one volition, belts the automatic powers, and these run on till they are again arrested or redirected. If the play of the nervous energy to and from the nervous centres is sufficient to secure motion without consciousness of any mental action whatever, as in the case of the heart, is it not equally capable of continuing a motion the will has established? If we analyze each voluntary motion, so called, into the most single muscular movements of which it is composed, and place a mental act back of each, we have an absurdly complex result, and one not in the least testified to by consciousness, nor required by the known conditions of the problem. All the powers of life are not mental, and a great share of the labor of living is done by forces with a strength and movement more or less, as the case may be, independent of intellectual control.

In acquired dexterities, volitions are required for a time to establish and confirm the automatic movement, but this, once settled, is able to sustain itself by a purely vital power, a play of nervous energies without the direct support of the will. The difficulty of the question seems to have arisen