stion is
nothing but the artificial selection of one idea to the exclusion of all
others, so that it passes into action. Natural somnambulism similarly
exhibits the force of ideas; whatever idea is conceived by the
somnambulist, he carries into action. The kind of dream in which
children often live is not without analogy to somnambulism. The fixed
idea is another instance of the same phenomenon, which is produced in
the waking state, and which, when exaggerated, becomes monomania, a kind
of morbid monoideism; children, having very few ideas, would very soon
acquire fixed ideas, if it were not for the mobility of attention which
the ceaseless variation of the surrounding world produces in them. Thus
all the facts grouped nowadays under the name of auto-suggestion may, in
my opinion, be explained. Here we shall generalize the law in this form:
every idea conceived by the mind is an auto-suggestion, the selective
effect of which is only counterbalanced by other ideas producing a
different auto-suggestion. This is especially noticeable in the young,
who so rapidly carry into action what is passing through their minds.

The philosophers of the seventeenth century, with Descartes and Pascal,
considered sentiments and passions as indistinct thoughts, as "thoughts,
as it were, in process of precipitation." This is true. Beneath all our
sentiments lies a totality of imperfectly analyzed ideas, a swelling
stream of crowded and indistinct reasons by the momentum of which we are
carried away and swept along. Inversely, sentiments underlie all our
ideas; they smoulder in the dying embers of abstractions. Even language
has a power because it arouses all the sentiments which it condenses in
a formula; the mere names "honor" and "duty" arouse infinite echoes in
the consciousness. At the name of "honor" alone, a legion of images is
on the point of surging up; vaguely, as with eyes open in the dark, we
see all the possible witnesses of our acts, from father and mother to
friends and fellow-countrymen; further, if our imagination is vivid
enough, we can see those great ancestors who did not hesitate under
similar circumstances. "We must; forward!" We feel that we are enrolled
in an army of gallant men; the whole race, in its most heroic
representatives, is urging us on. There is a social and even a
historical element beneath moral ideas. Besides, language, a social
product, is also a social force. The pious mind goes farther still; duty
i