Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/714

642 however, is still narrower, and is limited to mental states springing directly or indirectly from physical stimuli, especially from words.

The effects of mental states, to which I called attention in my second article, were long ignored in psychology. The first to obtain clear recognition was the property of producing ideas, and this has become famous as "the law of association." The motor effects of mental states have been more recently noted, and the study of such effects is now rapidly becoming the fashion in current psychology, much as the study of association came into vogue in England a century ago or thereabouts. Now, the study of association has been prosecuted for the most part by the psychologist's watching the flow of his own ideas, but the effects of mental states upon movements—what Prof. Baldwin calls dynamogeny—has hitherto been studied chiefly by noting the motor effects of ideas and sensations suggested from without by words or physical stimuli of other kinds. Hence the word "suggestion" has come to include among its connotations not only the notion of the cause but also that of the effect—especially the motor—effect of the suggested state, and in the derivative "suggestibility" the original meaning is almost lost; it does not mean "a condition in which mental states may be more readily initiated by suitable causes," but, "a condition in which mental states, however initiated, tend to work out their proper results more readily than usual." From this usage, which is nowadays the most common, is derived a still broader one which I shall not scruple to employ. By an individual's suggestibility we denote the fact that in him every mental state tends to work out definite results of its own. In this sense we are all suggestible. The word corresponds to dynamogeny, save that the latter term has reference to the motor tendencies only of the state, while suggestibility includes its tendency to development, its associative and metabolic tendencies as well. The condition commonly known as suggestibility, in which the results of the individual state are more easily traced than usual, I would strictly term "heightened suggestibility," but for the sake of brevity it may be allowable to call it also simply suggestibility; the context will usually show what degree of suggestibility we are talking of.

Suggestions may be subdivided with reference to their origin into suggestions from without, due to impressions received through the senses, and suggestions from within, arising from some pre-existing thought. These are usually termed auto-suggestions and hetero-suggestions. Both words are barbarous hybrids, but the former at least is too deeply fixed in usage to be displaced. The distinction is sometimes of importance, since many patients who are very suggestible from within are not at