ach
personal well-being from the physical side. They have for their support
a body of fact and a record of accomplishment which cannot be put out of
court without sheer intellectual stultification. Modern medicine has
been so massively successful in dealing with disease on the basis of a
philosophy which makes everything, or nearly everything, of the body and
nothing or next to nothing of the mind, that medicine was in danger of
becoming more sheerly materialistic than almost any other of our
sciences; Physics and Chemistry had their backgrounds in which they
recognized the interplay of realities too great for their formulae and
forces too subtle for their most sensitive instruments. But medicine was
almost in the way of forgetting all this when it was compelled--and
that for its own good--to take account of an entirely different set of
forces.

This was, to begin with, as far as the modern scientific approach is
concerned, first made clearly apparent in Hypnotism. Hypnotism seems to
be such a modification of normal mental conditions under the power of
commanding suggestion as really for the time being to focus
consciousness and mental action generally in one suggested line. A new
set of inhibitions and permissions are thus imposed upon normal
consciousness. Attention is withdrawn from the usual frontiers (if one
may use the word) to which, consciously or subconsciously, it has always
been directed and centered upon one single thing.[13]

[Footnote 13: Sidis defines Hypnosis as the disassociation of the
superior and inferior nerve centers. They commonly work in perfect
harmony, their blended unity forming one conscious personality. "In
hypnosis the two systems or nervous centers are disassociated, the
superior centers and the upper consciousness are inhibited or better cut
off, split off from the rest of the nervous system with its organic
consciousness, which is thus laid bare, open to the influence of
external stimuli or suggestions.... In hypnotic trance ... we have
direct access to man's organic consciousness and through it to organic
life itself."... If we broaden this last sentence to include not only
organic consciousness but the deeper strata of personality in which not
only individual but perhaps racial experience is bedded, we have the key
to a vast range of obscure phenomena. Sidis believes that "strong
permanent impressions or suggestions made on the reflex organic
consciousness of the inferior centers may