354 Miscellanea. 
sensory impressions is continually seen in persons who are subject to 
absence of mind, who make the most absurd mistakes as to what they see 
or hear, taste or feel, in consequence of the pre-occupation of the mind by 
some train of thought, which renders them unable rightly to appreciate the 
objects around them. In such persons, too, the memory of the most fami- 
liar things,—as the absent man’s own name, for example, or that of his 
most intimate friend,—is often in abeyance for a time; and it requires but 
# more complete obliteration of the consciousness of the past, through the 
entire possession of the mind by the intense consciousness of the present, 
to destroy the sense of personal identity. This, indeed, we often do in 
effect lose in ordinary dreaming and reverie. The essential characteristic 
of both these states, as of the “ biological” condition, is the suspension of 
voluntary control over the current of thought, so that the ideas follow one 
another suggestively; and, however strange or incongruous their com- 
binations or sequences may appear, we are never surprised at them, 
because we have lost the power of referring to our ordinary experience. It 
is well known that the course of ordinary dreams is often determined by 
impressions received through the organs of sense, although the individual 
may not be conscious of them as such; and those who are prone to reverie 
are well aware that the direction of their thoughts depends in many 
instances, not merely upon the previously existing associations between 
their ideas, but upon the excitement of new ideas by external impressions. 
There is one phenomenon of the “ biological’ state, which has been 
considered pre-eminently to indicate the power of the operator’s will over 
his subject; namely, the induction of sleep, and its spontaneous determi- 
nation at a given time previously ordained, or by the sound of the 
operator’s voice, and that only. It is well known that the expectation of 
sleep is one of the most powerful means of inducing it, especially when 
combined with the withdrawal of the mind from every thing else which 
could keep its atteution awake; both these conditions are united in an 
eminent degree in the state of the biologized subject, whose mind has been 
possessed with the conviction that sleep is about to supervene, and is closed 
to every source of distraction. Nor need the waking at a given time, or 
upon a given sound, (and upon that only), be accounted at all more strange; 
for it is a matter of familiar experience, that this is often determined, in the 
case of an ordinary sleeper, by the impression under which he passes into 
unconsciousness; the fixed intention to awake at a certain hour being 
productive of the exact consequence; and the habit of attention to a parti- 
cular sound, as that of a clock, bell, voice, &c., causing the sleeper to awake 
upon the slightest provocation from it, although his slumbers are not 
broken by noises of far greater intensity. 
Thus, then, however strange the phenomena of the “ biological” state 
may at first sight appear, there is not one of them, which, when closely 
scrutinized, is not found to be essentially conformable to facts whose genu- 
ineness every physiologist and psychologist is ready to admit. And the 
chief marvel is, that a state in which these phenomena are so easily and 
constantly producible, should be capable of being induced by so simple a 
