art of his own
individuality. He sees himself--and takes great pleasure in the
thought--as a strange child, who by these peculiarities creates
considerable interest in the minds of the grown-up people around him.
When the suggestion takes root it becomes fixed, and as likely as not
it will persist for his lifetime. It may be habitually said of a child
that, unlike his brothers and sisters, he will never eat bananas, and
thereafter till the day of his death he may feel it almost a physical
impossibility to gulp down a morsel of the offending fruit. So, too,
there are people who can bolt their food with the best of us, who yet
declare themselves incapable of swallowing a pill.

Another example of the force of suggestion, whether unconscious or
openly exercised by speech, is given us in the matter of sleep. Among
adults the act of going to bed serves as a powerful suggestion to
induce sleep. Seldom do we seek rest so tired physically that we drop
off to sleep from the irresistible force of sheer exhaustion. Yet as
soon as the healthy man whose mind is at peace, whose nerves are not
on edge, finds himself in bed, his eyes close almost with the force of
a hypnotic suggestion, and he drops off to sleep. With some of us the
suggestion is only powerful in our own bed, that on which it has acted
on unnumbered nights. We cannot, as we say, sleep in a strange bed. It
is suggestion, not direct will power, that acts. No one can absolutely
will himself to sleep. In insomnia it is the attempt to replace the
unconscious auto-suggestion by a conscious voluntary effort of will
that causes the difficulty. A thousand times in the night we resolve
that now we _will_ sleep. If we could but cease to make these
fruitless efforts, sleep might come of itself and the suggestion or
habit be re-established.

In little children the suggestion of sleep, provoked by being placed
in bed, sometimes acts very irregularly. Often it may succeed for a
week or two, and then some untoward happening breaks the habit, and
night after night, for a long time, sleep is refused. The wakeful
child put to bed, resents the process, and cries and sobs miserably,
to the infinite distress of his mother. It then becomes just as likely
that the child will connect his bed in his mind, not with rest and
sleep, but with sobbing and crying on his part, and mingled entreaties
and scoldings from his nurse or mother. An important part in this
perversion of the suggestion is pla