644 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ping of my hand struck " me " as something so strange that I fell 

 to looking about in the dark nooks and crannies of my mind to 

 find the culprit thought. Fortunately, I was in time. I had been 

 looking out of the window, and the lowering clouds had suggested 

 rain, walking the streets, getting wet ; my hand reached out for 

 the umbrella with some dim notion of taking off its cover and 

 making ready for the rain. Then arose a vague, unformed 

 thought which, if it had become articulate, would have taken 

 some such form as, " Two hours yet before I get there " : the hand 

 was arrested half extended, and fell. The whole of this little 

 comedy was enacted in an out-of-the-way corner of my mind, 

 while " I," the thinking self, was absorbed in a train of abstract 

 thought, and probably both the actors would have escaped notice 

 and been straightway forgotten had it not been for the inconsist- 

 ency of their motor results. 



Every object of perception and thought is a center of innumer- 

 able diverging suggestions. Not all of these are of equal strength, 

 and the manner in which any given object will affect a given indi- 

 vidual will vary with his education, his habits, and his present 

 mood. Many physical objects have, besides the lines of motor 

 suggestion which they share with others, certain special lines 

 peculiar to themselves. Of these perhaps the most important is 

 the use of the object. Thus, of all the things which I could 

 possibly do with a dagger, stabbing is to me by far the most 

 attractive, and I find it very attractive indeed. I can not handle 

 a dagger without feeling a marked propensity to strike the point 

 into anything that comes handy. Many other objects are simi- 

 larly suggestive. A gentleman, while visiting a friend of mine, 

 was asked to examine a fine rifle which his friend had recent- 

 ly acquired. He loaded it, poised it, lifted it to his shoulder, 

 took aim, remarking in a joking tone, " Suppose I fire ? " " Do," 

 said his friend and he did. Happily, the ball contented itself 

 with plowing its way through a cherry bookcase and four or 

 five books, and no lives were lost. When asked why he did such 

 a reckless thing, he could only say that he did not know he did 

 not intend to do it. To my mind there is nothing surprising 

 about it. The rifle, to a man fond of shooting but without much 

 experience, is instinct with dangerous suggestions. Ordinarily 

 the immensely preponderating mass of inhibiting ideas keeps 

 even the most reckless well within the danger line. But when 

 the rifle was loaded, cocked, and aimed, and the finger on the 

 trigger, a great mass of ideal and sensational suggestions were 

 excited to the highest pitch and all converged upon the delicate 

 muscles of the forefinger. Still, the inhibitory suggestions of 

 time and place would, under most circumstances, have been suffi- 

 cient to counteract all these ; probably the command, " Do," re- en- 



