Page:Philosophical Review Volume 12.djvu/572

556 objects quite a distance apart." These and other illustrations enforce the valuable precept that "the world merely gives us a succession of impressions which of themselves have no single and inevitable meaning;" we must learn to see and read the characters of the language of sensation, in much the same way, though with less artificiality, of course, as we draw meaning from combinations of black marks upon white paper.

In the treatment of unconscious ideas, as also of imitation and suggestion, the supreme significance of the commonplace is well insisted upon. "The fact that to-day I can recall experiences which had faded away during the night, and that in the dream state the mind of the most staid of us may drop its usual contents and live for hours in a mental whirl of dime-novel adventure, is just as good or bad evidence for unconscious ideas as the fact that Krafft-Ebbing's poor patient Ilma S. could sing Magyar songs and secrete articles while in an abnormal state of mind, and knew nothing of these acts until the same state was reinduced." There are more examples of the processes of suggestion within the commonplace field of daily experience than in all the literature of hypnotism. When we interpret a two-dimensional photograph on canvas as a three-dimensional reality, a variety of suggestions lead us to do so. In the social community of ideas each affects the other, and in the social intercourse of individuals each is at once the pattern and the clay. Imitation and suggestion are important to psychology, not because of the striking phenomena to which extreme instances thereof give rise, but because of their daily contact with the realities of mental life. A survey of imitation reveals it to be a "kind of go-cart in which the infant mind learns finally to walk alone;" by imitation and suggestion each learns to conduct himself psychologically, taking and giving according to his parts. "Each person, be he genius or be he dolt, is in some degree both imitator and pattern. ... Genius does not produce isolated and unprecedented work, but comes as a culmination of much partially successful striving on the part of others working in the same line." The other essays of the collection are less susceptible to a brief selection of their central message. The discussion of space relations most characteristically represents the great complexity of data and inference necessary to even a probable comprehensive interpretation of how we come to endow the mental world with its permanent qualities. The conception of the relations of mind and body, responsive as it has ever been to increase in knowledge, particularly to detailed knowledge of nerve cells and their behavior, still gives abundant room