f
you were right."

"It must be done, Lambert; and the very best service you can render is
to take your wife and go home, leaving Viola here in our care--But
that can wait till after you are rested." And with this final word he
closed the door and returned to his library to await Kate's return and
her inevitable demand for the story of what had taken place.

He took up one of the most recent books treating of Suggestion, and
resumed consideration of a paragraph which had arrested him as if a
hand had been placed upon his shoulder. "Suggestion does not limit or
depress the subconscious self, it sets it free, exalts its powers,
making it not something less, but something vastly more than the
normal and the conscious self."

Could it be possible that Viola, in common with hundreds of other
apparently well-authenticated cases, possessed the "psychic force"
which Maxwell, Richet, and Lombroso recognized? The hypothesis,
difficult as it was, profoundly inexplicable from every point of view,
was, after all, less of a wrench to the reason, came closer to the
frame of his philosophy than the claims of Crookes and Wallace. To
accept the spiritist faith even as a "working hypothesis" was
impossible to his definite type of mind.

If these raps, movements, voices, could be related to the working of
the subconscious mind, or, as Meyers called it, the "subliminal self,"
then the power of the hypnotist might be able to control their order
and to a certain extent their character. They were not signs of a
diseased brain (according to Meyers again), but were the
manifestations of a power scattered here and there among men, without
system, without known law. Maxwell agreeing with this, ends by saying:
"These mysterious phenomena are due, therefore, neither to spirits nor
disease, but to a perfectly natural force lying within the minds of
the sitters and exercised by the psychic."

He had already derived much hope from the monumental work of Meyers
and his school. Hundreds of cases of hallucinations, alternating
personality, hysterio-epilepsy, and other kindred apparent
abnormalities, had been studied by means of hypnotism, and certain
processes inhibited or set going at the will of an operator. The
latest word of these masters was most heartening. They had
demonstrated that the trance was no longer a necessary part of
hypnotism. That the subject would not follow out in trance any
improper or criminal suggestion which he would not do