Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/716

644 of my hand struck "me" as something so strange that I fell to looking about in the dark nooks and crannies of my mind to find the culprit thought. Fortunately, I was in time. I had been looking out of the window, and the lowering clouds had suggested rain, walking the streets, getting wet; my hand reached out for the umbrella with some dim notion of taking off its cover and making ready for the rain. Then arose a vague, unformed thought which, if it had become articulate, would have taken some such form as, "Two hours yet before I get there": the hand was arrested half extended, and fell. The whole of this little comedy was enacted in an out-of-the-way corner of my mind, while "I," the thinking self, was absorbed in a train of abstract thought, and probably both the actors would have escaped notice and been straightway forgotten had it not been for the inconsistency of their motor results.

Every object of perception and thought is a center of innumerable diverging suggestions. Not all of these are of equal strength, and the manner in which any given object will affect a given individual will vary with his education, his habits, and his present mood. Many physical objects have, besides the lines of motor suggestion which they share with others, certain special lines peculiar to themselves. Of these perhaps the most important is the use of the object. Thus, of all the things which I could possibly do with a dagger, stabbing is to me by far the most attractive, and I find it very attractive indeed. I can not handle a dagger without feeling a marked propensity to strike the point into anything that comes handy. Many other objects are similarly suggestive. A gentleman, while visiting a friend of mine, was asked to examine a fine rifle which his friend had recently acquired. He loaded it, poised it, lifted it to his shoulder, took aim, remarking in a joking tone, "Suppose I fire?" "Do," said his friend—and he did. Happily, the ball contented itself with plowing its way through a cherry bookcase and four or five books, and no lives were lost. When asked why he did such a reckless thing, he could only say that he did not know—he did not intend to do it. To my mind there is nothing surprising about it. The rifle, to a man fond of shooting but without much experience, is instinct with dangerous suggestions. Ordinarily the immensely preponderating mass of inhibiting ideas keeps even the most reckless well within the danger line. But when the rifle was loaded, cocked, and aimed, and the finger on the trigger, a great mass of ideal and sensational suggestions were excited to the highest pitch and all converged upon the delicate muscles of the forefinger. Still, the inhibitory suggestions of time and place would, under most circumstances, have been sufficient to counteract all these; probably the command, "Do,"