212 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING
tinued absence of mind, can hardly be hypnotized at all. It is especially among the nervous that a strikingly large num ber of this class are to be found, who cannot hold fast to a thought, in whom a perpetual wandering of the mind pre dominates. The disposition to hypnosis is also not espe cially common among those persons who are otherwise very impressible. It is well known that there are some who can be easily influenced in life, who believe all they are told, upon whom the most unimportant trifles make an impres sion, nevertheless, when an effort is made to hypnotize them, they offer a lively resistance, and the typical symptoms of hypnosis cannot be induced in them," 1 It seems then, as Moll intimates, that persons of weak mental organization are easily influenced by normal suggestion, by reason of the very conditions that render them intractible to the abnormal process. The " lively resistance " to the abnormal process offered by those who are so easily influenced in ordinary ex perience is probably to be explained as a reaction of the or ganism under the emotion of fear rather than as intelligent, self-controlled opposition. But more anon as to the condi tions of normal suggestibility.
It is important that we should clearly grasp the funda mental psychological principles which underlie the gen eral phenomena of suggestibility. We have previously em phasized the truth that the function of thinking is to guide the organism in its adjustment to the environment. The image of an act is, it is said, the incipiency of the act it is accompanied by the innervation of the motor tracts which are brought into play in the performance of the act. There is a tendency for those muscles to contract whose contrac tions are parts of the act when performed. When one thinks a word there is an innervation of the muscles of the vocal organs used in its pronunciation. When one thinks of walking, especially if the idea is vivid, there starts a nerve current to the muscles employed in that process. " In thinking of a visual object, e.g., of an illuminated sign, there
1 Ibid., p. 51.
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