will,_ which must be entirely put aside.
One must have recourse _exclusively_ to the imagination.

***

Many people who have taken care of their health all their life in vain,
imagine that they can be immediately cured by autosuggestion. It is
a mistake, for it is not reasonable to think so. It is no use expecting
from suggestion more than it can normally produce, that is to say, a
progressive improvement which little by little transforms itself into a
complete cure, when that is possible.

***

The means employed by the healers all go back to autosuggestion,
that is to say that these methods, whatever they are, words,
incantations, gestures, staging, all produce in the patient the
autosuggestion of recovery.

Every illness has two aspects unless it is exclusively a mental one.
Indeed, on every physical illness a mental one comes and attaches
itself. If we give to the physical illness the coefficient 1, the mental
illness may have the coefficient 1, 2, 10, 20, 50, 100, and more. In
many cases this can disappear instantaneously, and if its coefficient
is a very high one, 100 for instance, while that of the physical
ailment is 1, only this latter is left, a 101st of the total illness;
such a thing is called a miracle, and yet there is nothing miraculous
about it.

***

Contrary to common opinion, physical diseases are generally far
more easily cured than mental ones.

Buffon used to say: "Style is the man." We would put in that: "Man
is what he thinks". The fear of failure is almost certain to cause
failure, in the same way as the idea of success brings success, and
enables one always to surmount the obstacles that may be met with.

***

Conviction is as necessary to the suggester as to his subject. It is this
conviction, this faith, which enables him to obtain results where all
other means have failed.

***

It is not the person who acts, it is the method.

***

. . . Contrary to general opinion, suggestion, or autosuggestion can
bring about the cure of organic lesions.

Formerly it was believed that hypnotism could only be applied to the
treatment of nervous illnesses; its domain is far greater than that. It
is true that hypnotism acts through the intermediary of the nervous
system; but the nervous system dominates the whole organism. The
muscles are set in movement by the nerves; the nerves regulate the
circulation by their direct action on the heart, and by their action on
the blood vessels whic