172 NATURE AND MAN. 



intellectual operations may be (as it were) automatically per- 

 formed under their suggestive influence. But so long as these 

 processes are carried on without the control and direction of the 

 will, and the course of thought is entirely determined by sug- 

 gestions from without (the effects of which, however, are diversi- 

 fied by the mental constitution and habits of thought of the 

 individual), such movements are as truly automatic as are those 

 more directly prompted by sensations and impressions, although 

 originating in a more truly psychical source. But the automatic 

 nature of the purely emotional actions can scarcely be denied; 

 and as it is in those individuals in whom the intellectual powers 

 are the least exercised, and the controlling power of the will is the 

 weakest, that the emotions exert the strongest influence on the 

 bodily frame, so may we expect ideas to act most powerfully 

 when the dominance of the will is for the time completely 

 suspended. 



Thus the ideo-motor principle of action finds its appropriate 

 place in the physiological scale, which would, indeed, be incom- 

 plete without it. And, when it is once recognized, it may be 

 applied to the explanation of numerous phenomena which have 

 been a source of perplexity to many who have been convinced of 

 their genuineness, and who could not see any mode of reconciling 

 them with the known laws of nervous action. The phenomena 

 in question are those which have been recently set down to the 

 action of an " Od-force," such, for example, as the movements of 

 the " divining-rod," and the vibration of bodies suspended from 

 the finger ; both which have been clearly proved to depend on 

 the state of expectant attentio?i on the part of the performer, his 

 will being temporarily withdrawn from control over his muscles 

 by the state of abstraction to which his mind is given up, and the 

 anticipation of a given result being the stimulus which directly 

 and involuntarily prompts the muscular movements that produce it. 



