III. 1. It is not easy to assign a cause, why those animal movements, that have once occurred in succession, or in combination, should afterwards have a tendency to succeed or accompany each other. It is a property of animation, and distinguishes this order of being from the other productions of nature.When a child first wrote the word man, it was distinguished in his mind into three letters, and those letters into many parts of letters; but by repeated use the word man becomes to his hand in writing it, as to his organs of ...
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III. 1. It is not easy to assign a cause, why those animal movements, that have once occurred in succession, or in combination, should afterwards have a tendency to succeed or accompany each other. It is a property of animation, and distinguishes this order of being from the other productions of nature.When a child first wrote the word man, it was distinguished in his mind into three letters, and those letters into many parts of letters; but by repeated use the word man becomes to his hand in writing it, as to his organs of speech in pronouncing it, but one movement without any deliberation, or sensation, or irritation, interposed between the parts of it. And as many separate motions of our muscles thus become united, and form, as it were, one motion; so each separate motion before such union may be conceived to consist of many parts or spaces moved through; and perhaps even the individual fibres of our muscles have thus gradually been brought to act in concert, which habits began to be acquired as early as the very formation of the moving organs, long before the nativity of the animal; as explained in the Section XVI. 2. on instinct.2. There are many motions of the body, belonging to the irritative class, which might by a hasty observer be mistaken for associated ones; as the peristaltic motion of the stomach and intestines, and the contractions of the heart and arteries, might be supposed to be associated with the irritative motions of their nerves of sense, rather than to be excited by the irritation of their muscular fibres by the distention, acrimony, or momentum of the blood. So the distention or elongation of muscles by objects external to them irritates them into contraction, though the cuticle or other parts may intervene between the stimulating body and the contracting muscle. Thus a horse voids his excrement when its weight or bulk irritates the rectum or sphincter ani. These muscles act from the irritation of distention, when he excludes his excrement, but the muscles of the abdomen and diaphragm are brought into motion by association with those of the sphincter and rectum.
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