s, passes, fixation, monotonous
speaking, and so on narrow the contents of consciousness but hold the
idea of the hypnotizing person steadily in the center of attention. The
awakened expectation of sleep, the associated feeling of tiredness all
help to cut off attention from the remainder of the world, but as no
real sleep sets in, this cutting off from the remainder reenforces the
focusing of attention on the one central idea of the hypnotizing
personality. Every word and every movement of this personality become
therefore absorbed with that over-attention which leads at once from a
mere perceiving and grasping to a complete sinking into the suggested
idea with the suppression of all opposites, and thus to a blind
acceptance and belief. We saw before that such belief is indeed nothing
else but a motor setting in which certain ways of action are prepared.
We are to think in accordance with the belief in the suggested idea and
the channels for discharge in the opposite direction are closed. Even
the ordinary life shows us everywhere that the step from attention to
belief is a short one. The effort to grasp the object clearly works as a
suggestion to accept that which we are seeking as really existing, and
that from which we are to abstract and which we are to rule out through
our attention, we believe to be non-existent. The prestidigitator does
his tricks in order to sidetrack our attention, but he succeeds in
making us believe that we see or do not see whatever he wishes.

That the motor setting alone determines those changes and that a real
sleeplike inability of the centers does not set in, can also be
demonstrated by the results of later hypnotizations. I ask my hypnotized
subject not to perceive the friend in the room; he is indeed unable to
see him or to hear him. Yet his visual and acoustic centers are not
impaired, the defect is only selective, inasmuch as he sees me, the
hypnotizer, and not the friend. But even this selection inhibits only
the attitude and not the sensorial excitement. If I hypnotize him again
to-morrow and suggest to him now to remember all that the friend did and
said during yesterday's meeting, he is able to report correctly the
sense impressions which he got, which were inhibited only as long as
they contradicted the suggestion, but now rush to consciousness as soon
as the suggestion is reversed. As a matter of course, he must therefore
have received impressions through eye and ear in his hy