158 BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF HUMAN PROBLEMS 



ignored by the student interested in the biological 

 aspects of human instincts. The influence of one 

 mind on another has long been recognized as a strong 

 force for good or evil, and in a thousand ways the 

 influence of suggestion is now recognized in social 

 and religious phenomena. In very different spheres 

 of human activity leaders of men, as Christ, Savo- 

 narola, Napoleon, Bismarck, and Pierpont Morgan, 

 have unconsciously employed the impressionability 

 of less powerful or differently constituted minds in 

 order to gain their ends. The remarkable reli- 

 gious movement initiated in the United States by 

 Mrs. Eddy has its basis in the heightened sugges- 

 tibility and impressionability of the mind that 

 results from a powerful emotional appeal which 

 stimulates the emotionally controlled faculties of 

 the mind at the expense of the analytical. It has 

 long been recognized that the control of one mind 

 over another may be heightened in certain directions 

 by means of slight sensory effects obtained in the 

 procedures which result in the state called hypno- 

 tism. In hypnotism we have a state of artificially 

 induced mental abstraction a sleep in which con- 

 sciousness is limited or dissociated. In this state 

 there is a condition of heightened susceptibility to 

 suggestion. It is this increase of suggestibility 

 which is the essence of hypnotism, and not the state 

 of sleep, for this sleep may be very slight despite a 

 greatly heightened sensitiveness to suggestion 

 indeed, sleep may be lacking. In the hypnotic state 



