EDUCATION AND SELECTION. 351 



seized me and drew me down. I cried out, and continued stagger- 

 ing over the whirling waters, till help came to me. The mere 

 thought of vertigo provoked it. The board lying on the ground 

 suggests no thought of a fall when you walk over it ; but when it 

 is over a precipice and the eye takes the measure of the distance 

 to the bottom, the representation of a falling motion becomes in- 

 tense, and the impulse to fall correspondingly so. Even if you 

 are safe, there may still be what is called the attraction of the 

 abyss. The vision of the gulf as a fixed idea, having produced an 

 " inhibition " on all your ideas and forces, nothing is left but the 

 figure of the great hole, with the intoxication of the rapid move- 

 ment that begins in your brain and tends to turn the scales of the 

 mental balance. Temptation, which is continual in children be- 

 cause everything is new to them, is nothing else than the force of 

 an idea and the motive impulse that accompanies it. 



The force of an idea is greater as the thought is more distinctly 

 selected than others in the consciousness. This selection of an 

 idea that becomes so exclusive that the whole consciousness is 

 absorbed in it has been called monideism. The state is like that 

 of a hypnotized person. The hypnotizer creates an intellectual 

 void in the brain by inducing artificial sleep, and suggests a 

 thought which, being alone and unhampered, is at once realized 

 in movements ; and hypnotic suggestion is nothing else than this 

 artificial selection of a single idea to the exclusion of others. The 

 same force of the idea prevails in natural somnambulism. The 

 somnambulist no sooner thinks of anything than he performs it, 

 with his hands and feet as well as with his brain. The movement 

 of the overexcited brain is so lively and the resistance offered by 

 the sleeping organs is so weak that the impulse is communicated 

 to the limbs by the mere fact that it has been conceived. The 

 kind of dream in which children sometimes live is not without 

 some analogy with somnambulism. The fixed idea is another ex- 

 ample of the same phenomenon which is produced in the waking 

 state, and increasing may go on to monomania — a kind of un- 

 healthy monideism. Children, having few thoughts, would be 

 likely to have fixed ones, except for the mobility which perpetual 

 novelty causes in them. In this way all the facts may be ex- 

 plained that are grouped under the name of auto-suggestion. 

 Generalizing the law, we might say that every conceived idea is 

 an auto-suggestion, the suggestive effect of which is counterbal- 

 anced only by other ideas producing a different auto-suggestion. 

 This fact is especially exemplified in children, who execute very 

 quickly what passes in their heads. 



The force of example is likewise brought back to the commu- 

 nicative and selective force of all representation. In the same 

 manner is explained the form of suggestion in which the idea 



