FOSSUSSION AND MEDIUMSHIP. 221 



of motor automatism is somewhat different. Suggested move- 

 ments are controlled through the agency of ideas, the ideas being 

 directly suggested and the movements springing from them. But 

 in automatic movements the patient is not conscious of any ideas 

 controlling his movements ; they seem to him to spring from some 

 source outside himself. Some of these movements may plausibly 

 be ascribed to purely physiological causes ; others seem to require 

 the assumption of realms of mind dissevered from the normal 

 consciousness of the patient. If this view be correct, these forms 

 of automatism also would fall under the conception of suggesti- 

 bility, for they also would spring from mental states, although 

 those states would not lie within the range of the patient's con- 

 sciousness. 



We may further conjecture that some of the hallucinations 

 and automatic ideas, which rush cometlike into the patient's con- 

 sciousness from nowhere in particular, had, in fact, an actual be- 

 ing in the subconscious realm before becoming parts of the upper 

 system ; but, from the nature of the case, it is never possible to 

 verify the conjecture beyond a peradventure. 



The words suggestibility and automatism, then, do not so 

 much designate distinct classes of phenomena as the same phe- 

 nomena viewed from slightly different points, while the concep- 

 tion of the subconscious is an inference based upon the relations 

 which we know to exist between mental states and certain com- 

 plex movements of the body. All these phenomena belong to- 

 gether ; they can not be separated in theory, and they constantly 

 occur together in practice ; in short, they form a distinct natural 

 family by themselves. 



It is only within the last few years that they have attracted 

 the attention of professed psychologists, yet we can not suppose 

 that they never existed before. Even a superficial acquaintance 

 with the literature of occultism, present and past, is sufficient to 

 convince one that they have existed from time immemorial, that 

 they have provided in the past the basis for many of man's most 

 cherished convictions, precisely as in the present they constitute 

 the chief content of our modern "spiritualism." 



To get the least insight into these phenomena one must at the 

 outset disabuse one's self of the pseudo- scientific notion that they 

 are due to the " power of the imagination." It represents a rough 

 attempt to get at the truth, but, like many another half truth, 

 does more harm than good. We must clearly grasp the concep- 

 tion that man's mind is in many respects like his body. Like his 

 body, it is the scene of constant struggle and rivalry between 

 competing activities it might not be far amiss to call them forces 

 in the ebb and flow of which his being consists. As disease germs 

 occasionally succeed in effecting lodgment in his body and flour- 



