24 Dr. H. L. Stewart on 



this the first, not because it was the most frequent or the most 

 effective, but because it was the most obvious. It was a great 

 mistake, however, to regard this as the generic type of which the 

 others were more or less disguised varieties. Human nature was 

 equipped with three great innate tendencies, viz. — suggestibility, 

 sympathy, and imitation, corresponding to the threefold division 

 of conscious process. Each of the three modes of experience 

 was infectious, and they were separately infectious — thus the 

 three, innate tendencies were so many channels of contagion 

 between mind and mind. Suggestibility had a wide field in the 

 modern art of advertising. The advertiser wished to create a 

 public opinion in favour of the article which he had for sale. He 

 did not proceed by way of proof — his advertisements commonly 

 proved nothing but suggested much. They needed for effective 

 operation minds in which there were no antagonistic ideas on the 

 subject in question ; and, if this condition were fulfilled, the 

 flaming poster caused simply a low degree of hypnotism. The 

 most influential type of suggestion was that which had been given 

 the name " prestige suggestion." Just as the child looked upon 

 the word of his parents as a final authority on all matters, so the 

 adult had his heroes, who could lead him whithersoever they 

 chose. The ground on which our heroes had secured our homage 

 might be utterly unconnected with that sphere of opinion in which 

 we were nevertheless equally willing to trust them. Again, the 

 contagiousness of emotion was the key to not a few of the great 

 mass movements of history. Such upheavals, political, industrial, 

 religious, and anti-religious, had so long as they lasted turned the 

 world upside down. Some of them had been salutary and some 

 pernicious, but, whether salutary or pernicious, once the emotional 

 blaze had been lit up it had spread with the rapidity of a prairie 

 fire. One might illustrate from the Crusades, from anti-Semitism, 

 from the holy wars of the East. And these emotional movements 

 reacted upon opinions that we imagined to have been specula- 

 tively reached. It was impossible to keep our feelings and our 



