athy, sincerity, faith,
philanthropy, hope, epicurism, intemperance, ardor, spirituality,
effeminacy, imitation, romance and, in short, all amiable, sensitive,
intellectual, refining, relaxing influences may be regarded as
promotive of impressibility, and their opposites as calculated to
destroy it.

It is fortunate that disease promotes impressibility, for it enables
the sick to be relieved by manipulation, and it causes medicines to
operate more efficiently upon morbid constitutions or organs, which
has been fully demonstrated by the Homoeopathic School of
therapeutics. But impressibility does not imply disease, although it
may make the system more accessible to slight morbific agencies. We
find individuals occasionally, of the highest tone of health and
bodily vigor, who are highly impressible. Nor does it imply mental
weakness, for it is highly congenial to intellectuality, and is
occasionally found among the strongest and most cultivated minds.
Nervous Impressibility is that condition in which the nervaura has a
powerful influence--in which the action of the brain and all the vital
functions of the constitution may be controlled and indefinitely
changed by the application of the hands of another individual--in
which we are susceptible of being totally revolutionized in character
by application of the fingers to the various organs, so as to become,
for the time being, miserable or gay, philosophical, felonious,
murderous, angry, stupid, insane, idiotic, drowsy, hot, cold,
credulous, sceptical, timid, courageous, vain, indolent, sensual,
hungry, diffident, haughty, avaricious, etc.; and in which the
muscular strength, secretions, circulation, pulse, respiration,
senses, and morbid or healthy conditions of the frame may be changed
or controlled by the nervaura emitted from the hand of the operator
acting upon the brain of the subject.

The number of individuals who can be thus affected is different in
different places. In southern climates they are more numerous than in
northern--in the pleasant weather of summer more than in winter--in
lecture rooms, ball rooms and places of fervid religious worship, more
than in the street and market place, where the intellectual and moral
faculties are less predominant. In the Southern States of the Union,
thirty or forty per cent. of the population will give at once distinct
evidence of impressibility. In the more northern, about ten per cent.
will give indications of an influe