220. In certain cases of Janet's, indeed, a new and false, but helpful memory was substituted for the old distressing memory; as where a hysteric, suffering from horror at the recollection of having been made to sleep as a child along with another child suffering from skin-disease, was persuaded by hypnotic suggestion that this other child had really been perfectly sound and well. In Fraulein O.'s case no deception was needful. All that was necessary was to make her see past events in their true proportion. The confession was cathartic; it cleared away the morbid products and strengthened the coherence of the sane personality; it restored Fräulein O. to mental and bodily vigour.

"Wax to receive and marble to retain;" such, as we all have felt, is the human mind in moments of excitement which transcend its resistant powers. This may be for good or for evil, may tend to that radical change in ethical standpoint which is called conversion, or to the mere setting-up of some hysterical disability. Who shall say how far we desire to be susceptible to stimulus? Most rash would it be to assign any fixed limit, or to class as inferior those whose main difference from ourselves may be that they feel sincerely and passionately what we feel torpidly, or perhaps only affect to feel. "The term degenerate," says Dr. Milne Bram-well, "is applied so freely and widely by some modern authors that one cannot help concluding that they rank as such all who do not conform to some primitive, savage type, possessing an imperfectly developed nervous system." Our "degenerates" may sometimes be in truth progenerate; and their perturbation may mask an evolution which we or our children needs must traverse when they have shown the way.

Let us pause for a moment and consider what is here implied. We are getting here among the hystèriques qui mènent le monde. We have advanced, that is to say, from the region of idèes fixes of a paltry or morbid type to the region of idèes fixes which in themselves are reasonable and honourable, and which become morbid only on account of their relative intensity. Here is the debateable ground between hysteria and genius. The kind of genius which we approach here is not, indeed, the purely intellectual form. Rather it is the "moral genius," the "genius of sanctity," or that " possession " by some altruistic idea which lies at the root of so many heroic lives.

The hagiology of all religions offers endless examples of this type. That man would hardly be regarded as a great saint whose conduct seemed completely reasonable to the mass of mankind. The saint in consequence is apt to be set unduly apart, whether for veneration or for ridicule. He is regarded either as inspired or as morbid; when in reality all that his mode of life shows is that certain idèes fixes, in themselves of no unworthy kind, have obtained such dominance that their impulsive action may take and retake, as accident wills, the step between the sublime and the ridiculous.

Martyrs, missionaries, crusaders, nihilists, - enthusiasts of any kind who are swayed by impulses largely below the threshold of ordinary consciousness, - these men bring to bear on human affairs a force more concentrated and at higher tension than deliberate reason can generate. They are virtually carrying out self-suggestions which have acquired the permanence of idèes fixes: Their fixed ideas, however, are not so isolated, so encysted as those of true hysterics. Although more deeply and immutably rooted than their ideas on other matters, these subliminal convictions are worked in with the products of supraliminal reason, and of course can only thus be made effective over other minds. A deep subliminal horror, generated, say, by the sight of some loathsome cruelty, must not only prompt hallucinations, - as it might do in the hysteric and has often done in the reformer as well, - it must also, if it is to work out its mission of reform, be held clearly before the supraliminal reason, and must learn to express itself in writing or speech adapted to influence ordinary minds.