automatism of chorea, and in yet lower levels of decay we see them in
the aimless picking and plucking movements of the fingers of the sick.
In idiots[8] arrest of higher powers often goes with hypertrophy of
these movements, as seen in head-beaters (as if, just as nature impels
those partially blind to rub the eyes for "light-hunger," so it
prompts the feeble-minded to strike the head for cerebrations),
rockers, rackers, shakers, biters, etc. Movements often pass to fixed
attitudes and postures of limbs or body, disturbing the normal balance
between flexors and extensors, the significance of which as nerve
signs or exponents of habitual brain states and tensions Warner has so
admirably shown.

Abundance and vigor of automatic movements are desirable, and even a
considerable degree of restlessness is a good sign in young children.
Many of what are now often called nerve signs and even choreic
symptoms, the fidgetiness in school on cloudy days and often after a
vacation, the motor superfluities of awkwardness, embarrassment,
extreme effort, excitement, fatigue, sleepiness, etc., are simply the
forms in which we receive the full momentum of heredity and mark a
natural richness of the raw material of intellect, feeling, and
especially of will. Hence they must be abundant. All parts should act
in all possible ways at first and untrammeled by the activity of all
other parts and functions. Some of these activities are more essential
for growth in size than are later and more conscious movements. Here
as everywhere the rule holds that powers themselves must be unfolded
before the ability to check or even to use them can develop. All
movements arising from spontaneous activity of nerve cells or centers
must be made in order even to avoid the atrophy of disease. Not only
so, but this purer kind of innateness must often be helped out to some
extent in some children by stimulating reflexes; a rich and wide