1 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



over the mind, or ought to have, as the rider has upon his horse ; that 

 the powers and activities of the mind are to a very great degree inde- 

 pendent of the will; that the mind will go on of itself without any- 

 more than just the starting of the will, in the same manner as a horse 

 will go on in the direction that it has been accustomed to go with 

 merely the smallest impulse given by the voice, or the hand, or the 

 heel of the rider, and every now and then a very slight check (if it is 

 a well-trained horse) or guidance from the bridle, or from a touch of 

 the spur, and will follow exactly the course that the rider desires, but 

 by its own independent power. And, again, I showed you that as 

 there are occasions on which a horse is best left to itself, so there are 

 occasions when the mind is best left to itself, without the direction and 

 control of the will; in fact, in which the operations of the mind are 

 really disturbed by being continually checked and. guided and pulled 

 up by the action of the will, the result being really less satisfactory 

 than when the mind, previously trained and disciplined in that par- 

 ticular course of activity, is left to itself. I gave you some curious 

 illustrations of this from occurrences which have taken place in 

 Dreaming, or in that form of dreaming which we call Somnambulism : 

 where a legal opinion had been given, or a mathematical problem had 

 been resolved, in the state of sleep-waking; that is to say, the mind 

 being very much in the condition of that of the dreamer, its action 

 being altogether automatic, going on of itself without any direction 

 or control from the will but the bodily activity obeying the direction 

 of the mind. And then I went on to show you that this activity very 

 often takes place, and works out most important results, even without 

 our being conscious of any operations going on ; and that some of 

 these results are the best and most valuable to us in bringing at last 

 to our consciousness, ideas which we have been vainly searching for 

 as in the case where we have endeavored to remember something that 

 we have not at first been able to retrace, and which has flashed into 

 our minds in a few hours, or it may be a day or two afterward; or, 

 ao;ain, when we have been directing our minds to the solution of some 

 problem which we have put aside in a sort of despair, and yet in the 

 course of a little time that solution has presented itself while our 

 minds have either been entirely inactive, as in sleep, or have been 

 directed into some entirely different channel of action. 



Now, like the well-trained horse which will go on of itself with the 

 smallest possible guidance, yet still under the complete domination 

 of the rider, and will even find its way home when the rider cannot 

 direct it thither, we find that the human mind sometimes does that 

 which even a well-trained horse will do that it runs away from the 

 o-uidance of its directing will. Something startles the horse, some- 

 thing gives it alarm ; and it makes a sudden bound, and then, perhaps, 

 sets off at a gallop, and the rider cannot pull it up. This alarm often 

 spreads contagiously, as it were, from one horse to another, as we 



