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for all that the boy could eat at one time. Boy-like, the offer
was accepted, and the result was disastrous for years after
he could not look at a cream-puff without feeling sad and
reminiscent. And the memory of what he once found in a hotel
mince-pie, caused an associated suggestion that held its grip
with the passage of the years.
How many of our ideas are the result of associated suggestion,
we can tell only when we begin to take occasional mental stock.
Many of our ideas, feelings, prejudices, likes and dislikes, are the
result of this form of suggestion, rather than of anything really
attaching to them alone. The moral is that we should watch
carefully the company that our mental images are keeping, and
avoid unpleasant mental attachments.
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Chapter III.
Suggestion of Habit and Repetition.
III. The Suggestion of Habit: This form of Suggestion is closely
allied to the preceding phase, i. e. Suggestion of Association,
in fact, some consider it to be merely a branch of the latter.
But we feel that there is a decided difference in the operation
of the two phases, and accordingly prefer to treat this one as
forming a separate and distinct phase. Of course, all habit is an
association with something in the past, but Suggestion of Habit
may arise from an original cause of Suggestion of Authority;
Suggestion of Association; Suggestion of Repetition; Suggestion
of Imitation; or else from an original decision of the intellect
resulting from correct reasoning. The suggestive feature of
Suggestion of Habit arises not from the nature of its original
cause, but from the fact that the previous action or thought
acts as a suggestion for the act or thought of the present. The
former act or thought acts as a suggestive outside influence,
although it belongs to one s own mentality.
It is astonishing to many of us, when occasionally we are
brought to a realization of the degree of habit-action and habitthought
that has been developed within us. We do things simply
because we have done them before, notwithstanding the fact
that the circumstances of the case have altered materially; we
Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion