In this experience the confusion of ideas, though less agreeable, was essentially similar to that occasioned by the action of the hasheesh. In both cases there was the same diminution of the intensity of external sensation accompanied by an exaggeration of internal impressions. The brain and the nerves were in a condition of irritable weakness, caused by disease, which interfered with the normal generation and association of ideas. Having thus partially escaped from the control of the senses and the will, the mutilated succession of ideas which reached the field of consciousness could only be perceived as a series of illusions. Here, again, was a waking dream, of origin and course analogous to the illusions and hallucinations which accompany every form of delirium. It is not alone under the influence of disease or of drugs that the automatic action of the brain furnishes ideas for the inspection of the mind. Riding, one day, in a street-car, and reading a philosophical work, I came upon a paragraph devoted to a discussion of the doctrine of the association of ideas. Immediately, out of memory, flashed a momentary vision of the quarter deck of the old frigate, United States, upon which appeared the figure of a very small midshipman, talking to a gigantic personage, the captain of the ship. This was an incident which I had actually witnessed forty years before. I was, at first, somewhat puzzled in the attempt to account for the occurrence of a vision so apparently incongruous with the subject matter of the book; but a little reflection convinced me that the exciting cause of this seemingly involuntary act of memory was really the idea of association suggested by the book. This had unconsciously aroused the apparatus of association in the brain, and the particular scene thus brought before the mind had been further suggested by the circumstance that the last object, external to the printed page, upon which I had fixed my attention, was a large ship, lying in the river, near the bridge, just crossed by the car in which I rode.