Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1886 edition. Excerpt: ... chapter vii. emotional and motor effects. 1. We come next to a class of cases which are characterised not so much by the distinctness of the idea as by the strength of the emotion produced in the percipient. In some of these the emotion has depended on a definite idea, and has been connected with a sense of calamity to a particular individual, or a particular household: in others it has not had reference to any definite idea, and has seemed at the time quite causeless and unreasonable. Sometimes, again, the analogy with experimental cases, in the direct reflection of experience from mind to mind, is distinctly retained,1 the experience of the percipient seeming actually to reproduce that of a relative or friend who is in some physical or mental crisis at a distance; while in other cases a peculiar distress on the one side is so strikingly contemporaneous with a unique condition on the other, that we cannot refuse to consider the hypothesis of a causal connection. From the point of view of evidence, this class of emotional impressions clearly requires the most careful treatment. There is all the difference between a sensory impression, and even between the more distinct" mental pictures " of the last chapter, and a mere mood. We have no grounds for assuming that the news (for instance) of a 1 The emotional class of impressions is, of course, a field peculiarly ill-adapted for deliberate experiment. Strong emotion cannot be summoned up at will by an experimenter even in his own mind; while, if it exists, it probably betrays itself in ways beyond his control. Cases are, indeed, alleged where a secret grief or anxiety on a meameriser's part has been reflected in the demeanour of his "subject." But this would not necessarily prove more..."
