[523] Here again the perception in question must take place below the threshold of ordinary consciousness, possibly in one of those split-off selves or 'second' states whose existence we have so often to recognize.
[524] I myself verified many of the above effects of the magnet on a blindfolded subject on whom I was trying them for the first time, and whom I believe to have never heard of them before. The moment, however, an opaque screen was added to the blindfolding, the effects ceased to coincide with the approximation of the magnet, so that it looks as if visual perception had been instrumental in producing them. The subject passed from my observation, so that I never could clear up the mystery. Of course I gave him consciously no hint of what I was looking for.
[525] Binet and Féré, 'Animal Magnetism,' in the International Scientific Series; A. Bernheim. 'Suggestive Therapeutics' (N. Y., 1889); J. Liégeois, 'De la Suggestion' (1889); E. Gurney, two articles in Mind, vol. ix.—In the recent revival of interest in the history of this subject, it seems a pity that the admirably critical and scientific work of Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell of Philadelphia should remain relatively so unknown. It is quite worthy to rank with Braid's investigations. See "Five Essays" by the above author, edited by S. Weir Mitchell, Philadelphia, 1859, pp. 141-274.
[CHAPTER XXVIII.]
NECESSARY TRUTHS AND THE EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE.
In this final chapter I shall treat of what has sometimes been called psychogenesis, and try to ascertain just how far the connections of things in the outward environment can account for our tendency to think of, and to react upon, certain things in certain ways and in no others, even though personally we have had of the things in question no experience, or almost no experience, at all. It is a familiar truth that some propositions are necessary. We must attach the predicate 'equal' to the subject 'opposite sides of a parallelogram' if we think those terms together at all, whereas we need not in any such way attach the predicate 'rainy,' for example, to the subject 'to-morrow.' The dubious sort of coupling of terms is universally admitted to be due to 'experience'; the certain sort is ascribed to the 'organic structure' of the mind. This structure is in turn supposed by the so-called apriorists to be of transcendental origin, or at any rate not to be explicable by experience; whilst by evolutionary empiricists it is supposed to be also due to experience, only not to the experience of the individual, but to that of his ancestors as far back as one may please to go. Our emotional and instinctive tendencies, our irresistible impulses to couple certain movements with the perception or thought of certain things, are also features of our connate mental structure, and like the necessary judgments, are interpreted by the apriorists and the empiricists in the same warring ways.
I shall try in the course of the chapter to make plain three things:
1) That, taking the word experience as it is universally understood, the experience of the race can no more account for our necessary or a priori judgments than the experience of the individual can;