Mental impressibility is dependent upon intellectual organs, which feel the influences of mind. The power of recognizing mental action is dependent upon the internal part of the front lobe, located just above the root of the nose. This organ gives physiognomical talent, and a ready tact in appreciating the expression of mind through the eye, countenance, and gestures. It is a channel of mental sympathy, as displayed in the intercourse of society, and in the experiments of animal magnetism. By means of this organ, a general relation is established between the mind of the operator and that of the subject, which may exist without the capacity for local impressions, which would develop particular organs. It is devoted, however, to active perception rather than to passive impression. The faculty of being mentally impressed depends also upon the region of Spirituality and Marvellousness.
Mental and nervous impressibility being dependent upon these organs, it follows that a large development of the front lobe favors Impressibility, and that the occipital organs tend to diminish it. Impressibility lies in a group of organs which sustain it, and may be expected to accompany its development. Sensibility, Somnolence, Dreaming, Ideality, Modesty, Humility, Organic Sensibility, Relaxation, etc., are its natural accompaniments; hence it will be found most abundantly in those classes of society which are most remarkable for refinement, sensitiveness, modesty, diffidence, humility, or submissiveness, disease, languor, debility, and intellectual excitement. Religious excitement, love, mirthfulness, thoughtfulness, imagination, benevolence, sympathy, 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.