tions from without, but surely such openness to selfimplanted
beliefs must be acknowledged as symptomatic of disease, while hypnosis
with its impositions can be broken off at any moment and thus should no
more be classed among the diseases than are sleep and dreams. The
hysteric or psychasthenic autosuggestion resists the mere will of
breaking it off. Here, therefore, is the classical ground for strong
mental counterinfluences, that is, for psychotherapeutic treatment.
Experience shows that the strongest chance for the development of such
autosuggestive beliefs exists wherever an emotional disposition is
favorable to the arriving belief. But emotion too is after all
fundamentally a motor reaction. The whole meaning of emotion in the
biological sense is that it focuses the actions of man into one channel,
cutting off completely all the other impulses and incipient actions.
Emotion is therefore for the expressions of man what attention is for
the impressions. An emotional disposition means thus in every case a
certain motor setting by which transition to certain actions is
facilitated. It is thus only natural that a belief can settle the more
easily, the more it is favored by an emotional disposition, as the motor
setting for the one must prepare the other. Hypnosis and hysteria thus
represent the highest degrees of suggestibility, the one artificial, the
other pathological; the one for suggestions from without, the other for
suggestions from within. But between these two and the normal state
there lie numberless steps of transition. The normal variations
themselves may go to a limit where they overlap the abnormal artificial
product, that is, the suggestibility of many normal persons may reach a
degree in which they accept beliefs hardly acceptable to other persons
in mild hypnotic condition. Thus there is no sharp demarcation between
suggestions in a waking state and suggestions in a hypnoid state. And
the expectation of coming under powerful influence may produce a
sufficient change in the motor setting to realize any wonders. Moreover
probably every physician who has a long experience in hypnotizing has
found that his confidence in the effectiveness of the deep hypnotic
states has been slowly diminished, while his belief in the surprising
results of slight hypnotization and of hypnoid states has steadily grown
and has encouraged him in his psychotherapeutic efforts.

VI

THE SUBCONSCIOUS

The story of the s