Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/717

Rh the latter at the very moment that it distracted attention from the former, and the slight advantage thus given to the weaker of the two systems of forces was sufficient to contract the finger and bring about the catastrophe.

The spontaneous phenomena which the Germans call Massenpsychosen—a word denoting a state of mind shared by a mass of people at once—are nothing more than Nature's experiments in suggestibility conducted on a large scale for our benefit. The panic is a familiar illustration. The terrifying suggestion which each man could easily brave alone becomes so intensified in being reflected upon him from a thousand frightened faces that he gives way and becomes for the time being an unreasoning, struggling animal. During every great strike such phenomena are common. A crowd gathers, the spirit of disorder is abroad, and the soberest of citizens feels his fingers fairly itching for mischief. A stone is thrown, another, and then another, and in a few moments every man is vying with his neighbor to see how much damage he can do. In these cases the frequently repeated suggestions given by the words, and still more by the deeds, of others overcome the results of years of training in orderly habits, and when the excitement has subsided many a participant in the late riot may fall to wondering "what in the world possessed him." The colloquial phrase, like many another, enshrines a truth. He was indeed possessed—not by any evil spirit, to be sure, but by myriads of delicate physical impulses, which, streaming in through eye and ear, prompted him with almost irresistible force to violence.

The so-called "contagion of crime" is somewhat analogous. There are at all times in the community "weak brethren" who, while not criminals, are drawn like moths to the flame by the fascination of a great crime. The Whitechapel murders and the assassination of Mr. Harrison, late Mayor of Chicago, are illustrations fresh in our minds. In each case a crop of dangerous "cranks" was brought to light, who, without the suggestion, might never have fallen into the hands of the police.

Turning now from these illustrations of suggestibility in general to the conditions under which it is heightened, the first phenomena to arrest attention are those of childhood. The consciousness of a newborn baby must be very unlike anything that we can picture. It contains perhaps sensations of pain and touch something like those with which we are familiar, but differing from them in lacking all localization and reference to an outer world. It is only by slow degrees that sight and hearing are developed, and we can never hope to know the various stages through which the raw material delivered to consciousness by the developing organs of sense must pass before it becomes