SUGGESTIBILITY AND KINDRED PHENOMENA. 375 



You will, I hope, forgive me for casting the shadow of disease 

 over the festival spirit of this hour. But, after all, our lasting 

 enjoyment is most frequently secured by such physical well-being 

 as these new outlooks in medicine promise to cherish. 



And so, gentlemen of the graduating class, at last, to the life- 

 long study of this science which looks out upon so many path- 

 ways toward the light, and to the practice of our art, whose aims 

 are ever closely linked to the high realities of life, it is now my 

 privilege, on behalf of our guild, and in the name of the Faculty 

 of this ancient and honored college of medicine, to bid you a cor- 

 dial welcome. 



SUGGESTIBILITY, AUTOMATISM, AND KINDRED 



PHENOMENA. 



Bt Prof. WILLIAM ROMAINE NEW BOLD. 



II. THE PROPERTIES OF MENTAL STATES. THE CONCEPTION OF 



THE SUBCONSCIOUS. 



THERE is another deduction from the doctrine of parallelism 

 which has been much disputed but which seems to me legiti- 

 mate. I know that when I glance up from my paper, see a pen, 

 reach out and take it, ether waves which fell upon the retina of 

 my eye produced there chemical changes which irritated the optic 

 nerve; the irritation was transmitted to the visual centers of the 

 brain, thence propagated to the motor centers, and from the motor 

 centers went an impulse which contracted the muscles of my arm. 

 But I am not directly conscious of all this. It seems to me that 

 the conscious state which I call the perception of the pen caused 

 the thought of the movement and the movement itself at almost 

 the same time. Now, if we believe that every conscious state which 

 we know has its physical concomitant of which we know nothing 

 save by inference, I see no reason why we may not, for the time 

 at least, ascribe directly to the mental states the properties which 

 we believe belong in all strictness to their physical bases only. 

 Thus, I think it correct to say that the perception of the pen 

 awakened the thought of taking it and that that in turn produced 

 the movement. Yet in using this form of speech we must guard 

 against certain erroneous inferences which are frequently drawn 

 from it. The first is that the perception of the pen was the only 

 cause of the thought of taking it, and so on. We now know that 

 the whole sequence which I have described depends for its exist- 

 ence and development upon the constitution of the total system of 

 processes. This we are apt to forget, when we deal with the men- 

 tal only, for the law of attention prevents any but a small portion 



