es a treatment for the relief
of the trouble. In every case yet diagnosed a cure has almost
immediately resulted." This kind of gift is so frequent that it is
really surprising that so many physicians still rely on their clumsier
method. Marvellous also are the effects which hypnotism can secure in
this paradise of the ignorant. After having hypnotized patients many
hundred times, I fancied that I had a general impression as to the
powers and limits of hypnotism. But there is no end to the new
information which I get from my hypnotizing correspondents. "Has it
ever occurred to you that by hypnotism death will be prevented, and
all ills, mental or otherwise, be cured before long? Why do I think
so?" Of course I do not know why she thinks so. I usually do not know
why the writers of the underworld letters think so. Or rather I
usually do know that they do not think at all.

There may be many who will read all this not only with surprise, but
with skepticism. They live their intellectually clean lives, dwell in
safe, comfortable houses of the intellect and move on well-paved
educational streets, and never see or hear anything of those
inhabitants of the intellectual slums. If ever a letter like those
which pour in hundreds to the desk of the psychologist were to stray
into their mail, they would feel sure that they had to do with a
lunatic who belongs in an asylum under a physician's care. They have
no idea that not only their furnaceman and washwoman, but also their
tailor and their watchmaker, or perhaps the teacher of their children,
and, if they examine more carefully, three of their last dinner
guests, are strolling for hours or for a night, or living for seasons,
if not for a lifetime, in that world of superstition and
anti-intellectual mentality. Such people are not ill; they are
personally not even cranks; they are simply confused and unable to
live an ordered intellectual life. Their character and temperament and
their personality in every other respect may be faultless, but their
ideas are chaotic. They bring together the contradictory and make
contrasts out of the identical, and, far from any sound religious
belief or any true metaphysical philosophy, they simply mix any
mystical whims into the groups of thought which civilization has
brought into systematic order. Instead of trying to learn, they are
always longing for some illegitimate intellectual profit; they are
always trying to pick the pocket of the abso