ectricity.

If this simile is not enough, we may compare the imagination--"the
madman at home" as it has been called--to an unbroken horse which
has neither bridle nor reins. What can the rider do except let himself
go wherever the horse wishes to take him? And often if the latter
runs away, his mad career only comes to end in the ditch. If however
the rider succeeds in putting a bridle on the horse, the parts are
reversed. It is no longer the horse who goes where he likes, it is the
rider who obliges the horse to take him wherever he wishes to go.

Now that we have learned to realize the enormous power of the
unconscious or imaginative being, I am going to show how this self,
hitherto considered indomitable, can be as easily controlled as a
torrent or an unbroken horse. But before going any further it is
necessary to define carefully two words that are often used without
being properly understood. These are the words _suggestion_ and
_autosuggestion_.

What then is suggestion? It may be defined as "the act of imposing
an idea on the brain of another". Does this action really exist?
Properly speaking, no. Suggestion does not indeed exist by itself. It
does not and cannot exist except on the _sine qua non_ condition of
transforming itself into _autosuggestion_ in the subject. This latter
word may be defined as "the implanting of an idea in oneself by
oneself."

You may make a suggestion to someone; if the unconscious of the
latter does not accept the suggestion, if it has not, as it were,
digested it, in order to transform it into _autosuggestion_, it
produces no result. I have myself occasionally made a more or less
commonplace suggestion to ordinarily very obedient subjects quite
unsuccessfully. The reason is that the unconscious of the subject
refused to accept it and did not transform it into _autosuggestion_.

THE USE OF AUTOSUGGESTION

Let us now return to the point where I said that we can control and
lead our imagination, just as a torrent or an unbroken horse can be
controlled. To do so, it is enough in the first place to know that this
is possible (of which fact almost everyone is ignorant) and secondly,
to know by what means it can be done. Well, the means is very
simple; it is that which we have used every day since we came into
the world, without wishing or knowing it and absolutely
unconsciously, but which unfortunately for us, we often use wrongly
and to our own detriment. This means is _autosugg