negative. A friend who comes from the quiet country may feel unable to
pass the busy square of the city. The fear of an accident holds back his
steps, he cannot give the impulse to walk through the crowded rush of
vehicles. Now either by words of advice, by persuasion or by showing the
way, we may apply our suggestion, we open the channels of discharge for
the necessary movements and thus decrease the excitability of those
centers in which nervous fear was playing. And again small steps lead
from here to the case of the psychasthenic sufferer whose phobia does
not allow him to cross any square and where reenforced suggestion has to
break open the ways for the walking movement when the square is reached.

Thus we are not far from a causal understanding of suggestive influences
wherever actions are concerned, where movements are to be reenforced or
to be suppressed and where antagonism of the motor paths is involved.
But that does not seem to lead us nearer to the much larger group of
states in which the whole suggestive process concerns apparently the
interplay of ideas alone, where not actions but impressions are
controlled by suggestion, where not impulses but thoughts are
strengthened or inhibited. Here lies the real psychophysical problem
which has been by far too much neglected in scientific psychology and
has almost been hidden and made to disappear in the wonderful accounts
of the hypnotists. But all those mysterious stories as to the
achievements of suggestion cannot help so long as we do not understand
the working of the process, and we shall have the better chance to
understand it the more we keep away from the uncanny and mysterious
results which refer to the most complex conditions, and rather seek to
analyze the state in its simplest forms and compare it with other simple
mental processes. The psychology of suggestion has suffered too much by
the fascination which its most complex forms exert on a trivial
curiosity.

Yet the problem of suggestion in the field of ideas stands after all not
isolated. Instead of connecting it with the weird reports of mystic
influence from man to man, let us rather link it with the simple
experience of attention. There is no pulse-beat of our life in which
attention does not play its little role. But does not attention share
with suggestion the characteristic feature that some contents of
consciousness are reenforced and others are suppressed? This negative,
this suppressing