Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 September 1893 — THE ATTRACTION OF THE ABYSS. [ARTICLE]

THE ATTRACTION OF THE ABYSS.

Why People Long to Throw Themselves from High Places. Chevreul’s well-known experiments with the exploratory pendulum and the divining rod show that if we represent to ourselves a motion in any direction the hand will unconsciously realize it and communicate it to the pendulum. Tfye. tippiug tables realize a movement we are anticipating through the intervention of a real movement of the hands, of which we are not conscious. Mind reading by those who divine by taking your hand where you have hidden anything, is a reading of imperceptible motions by which your thoughts are translated without your being conscious of them. In cases of fascination and vertigo, which are more visible among children than among adults, a movement is begun the suspension of which is prevented by a paralysis of the will, and it carries us to suffering and death. When a child I was navigating a plank on the river without a thought that I might fall. All at once the idea came like a diverging force projecting itself across the rectillinear thought, which had alone previously directed my action. It was as if an invisible arm seized me and drew me down. I cried out and continued staggering over the whirling waters till help came to me. The mere thought of vertigo provoked it The board lying on the ground suggests no thought of fall when you walk over it, but when it is over a precipice and the eye takes the measure of the distance to the bottom the representation of a falling motion becomes intense, and the impulse to fall correspondingly so. Even if you are safe there may still be what is called the attraction of the abyss. The vision of the gulf as a fixed idea, having produced an “inhibition” on all your ideas or forces, nothing is left but the figure of the great hole, with the intoxication of the rapid movement that begins in your brain and tends to turn the scales of the mental balance. Temptation, which is continual in children because everything is new to them, is nothing else than the force of an idea and the motive impulse that accompanies it.