d. And what would remain of art if it had not this
power of suggestion by which it comes to us and wins the victory over
every opposing idea? We believe the painter and we believe the novelist,
if their technique is good. We do not remember that the inventions of
their genius are contrary to our life experience; we feel sympathy with
the hero and do not care in the least that he has no real life. The
suggestion of art has inhibited in us every contrary idea.

Such daily experience shows us that suggestive power may belong to
different men in different degree. There are lawyers whose arguments and
whose presentation open our mind, it seems, to any suggestion: while
others leave us indifferent; we understand their idea, we follow their
thoughts, and yet we remain accessible to opposite influences. There are
teachers whose authority gives to every word such an impressiveness and
dignity that every opposite thought disappears, while others throw out
words which are forgotten. On the other hand, the readiness to accept
suggestions is evidently also quite different with different
individuals. From the most credulous to the stubborn, we have every
degree of suggestibility, the one impressed by the suggestive power of
any idea which is brought to his mind, the other always inclined to
distrust and to look over to the opposite argument. Such a stubborn mind
is indeed not only without inclination for suggestions, but it may
develop even a negative suggestibility; whatever it receives awakens an
instinctive impulse towards the opposite. Moreover we are all in
different degrees suggestible at different times and under various
conditions. Emotions reenforce our readiness to accept suggestions. Hope
and fear, love and jealousy give to the impression and the idea a power
to overwhelm the opposite idea, which otherwise might have influenced
our deliberation. Fatigue and intoxicants increase suggestibility very
strongly. To look out on a wider perspective, we may add at once that an
artificial increase of suggestibility is all which constitutes the state
of hypnotism.

At first, however, we want to understand the ordinary process of
suggestion in that normal form in which it enters into every hour of our
life and into every relation of our social intercourse. But if we begin
to examine the structure of the process, we can no longer be satisfied
with the vague reference to ideas and their opposites. What does it mean
after all if we spe