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CHAPTER XIF. 



ON SYMPATHY AND SYMPATHETIC SENSATIONS AND MOTIONS. 



IT is popularly known that the act of yawning, performed by one 

 individual in a company, is apt to induce in many of the others an 

 irresistible tendency to the same act. In a similar manner, the ex- 

 citement of certain emotions (mirth or sadness, laughter or tears) is 

 apt to spread through an assemblage of persons with extraordinary 

 rapidity. The power of eloquence, of music, or of spectacle, to pro- 

 duce such effects, is witnessed every day in places of public resort, 

 whether for devotion, business, or amusement. 



Many instances are known in .which convulsions have been 

 excited in persons not previously subject to them, by the sight of 

 a patient in an epileptic fit. And peculiar nervous disorders, of 

 a convulsive kind, have been found to affect nearly all the 

 members of a community without the slightest evidence of their 

 being contagious or infectious. An impression upon an organ of 

 sense may produce effects very different in their nature to anything 

 which could be anticipated ; and these may be purely of a physical 

 kind, or they may act primarily upon the mind. Thus certain 

 odours will induce syncope in some people ; and the smell of a 

 savoury dish to a hungry person, or even the mention or the 

 thought of a meal, will excite a flow of saliva. The emotion of pity 

 excited by the sight of some object of compassion, or by a narra- 

 tive of a mournful kind, will produce a copious flow of tears. 



All such phenomena are said to result from Sympathy. When 

 one yawns, immediately in consequence of ano ther's yawning, the 

 former evidently and truly sympathises with the latter ; and the 

 convulsions which are induced by the sight of another in a fit, are 

 not less sympathetic. The individual in whom the convulsions are 

 induced sympathises with the other. Such obvious instances of 

 sympathy between different individuals led to the supposition of 

 some such similar consent between different or even distant parts 

 in the same person. 



Motions or sensations caused in certain parts in consequence of a 

 primary irritation of other and distant parts are of the sympathetic 



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