526. Let us then regard hypnotic suggestion as a summarised education, and consider over what range of inhibition and dynamogeny an ordinary education is expected to extend. I deal in Appendices with the obscure but important question of prenatal suggestion, and pass on to the point when education admittedly begins; that is, of course, in the cradle. There it enters at once upon its double task of repression and stimulus. Repression is needed long before moral teaching begins, from the mere fact that all kinds of impulses tend to express themselves in act, - and that many of the resultant acts, if often repeated, are unbecoming or injurious. The prevention and cure of bad tricks is a main business of the nursery. Hardly more than bad tricks, in their inception, are various other impulses of haste, anger, greed, sensuality, which if left unchecked may develop into deep-seated vice. And even when the frame is matured and self-control in most other matters assured, the special attractiveness of certain stimulants for certain organisms overcomes the whole inhibitory strength - the most needful prudence - of no small proportion of the human race.

The field over which inhibition is necessary is thus a very wide one.

We shall presently find that hypnotic suggestion is able to exert effective control at every point.

The work of stimulus or dynamogeny in education is even more difficult to execute properly than that of inhibition. We know pretty well what we wish to prevent the child from doing. It is harder to discover all that a judicious education might advantageously teach him to do. The very first lesson which we have to impress upon him - attention - is really of unknown scope. We are usually satisfied with the inhibitory side of the lesson; with the restraint of wandering thought. The intensity of the attention thus steadied is a different matter; and I shall presently quote certain experiments which point to possibilities in this direction as yet seldom realised. Intellectual education, rendered possible by attention, includes the training of perception, memory, and imagination; and all these faculties will be found to have been sometimes much heightened by hypnotic suggestion.

Moral education, again, presupposes a training of attention, mainly in emotional directions, and by methods often both inhibitive and dynamo-genie. We restrain morbid fears by inculcating courage and self-respect; we use "the expulsive power of a new affection" to banish unworthy desire. A review of certain hypnotic triumphs will presently illustrate the potency of suggestion in cases where a life has seemed irretrievably ruined by some insistent pre-occupation or inescapable fear.

The self-regarding virtues, as has been said, depend largely upon power of inhibition; and where dynamogeny is needed for the attainment of those virtues, - where it is important to stimulate rather than to control, - the stimulus is applied to instincts which we are pretty sure to find already existing. Every man wishes with more or less energy for health, wealth, consideration, success. But when from the self-regarding we pass on to the altruistic virtues, we cannot be equally sure of finding an impulse ready for development.

After a certain point of helpfulness and kindliness has been reached, the higher strains of generosity, self-abnegation, impersonal enthusiasm, lie outside the field of ordinary education. Similarly they seem as yet to lie outside the field of ordinary hypnotic suggestion. We shall indeed presently find that the cured dipsomaniac or morphinomaniac is reported as leading a life which wins the esteem of his fellow-men. He reaches, one may say, a position of ethical stability; but we have no evidence of his attaining to any eminent virtue.

In point of fact no one is likely to apply to a physician to hypnotise him into a saint. Nor again, - and this is of more practical importance, - is any selfish successful man likely to ask to be rendered generous and unworldly. He has in his own way adapted himself to his environment; he does not wish to be profoundly changed.

It is not, therefore, from the hospital or the consulting-room that we should expect to hear of great changes of character for lofty ends. Such changes have not been made, and perhaps can hardly be made, the subjects of experiments in cold blood. They occur, nevertheless. In every race, in every age, there have been conversions - changes and elevations of character ascribed to Divine Grace. We shall find as we proceed that at this point our review of hypnotic effects merges - as on any satisfactory theory it ought to merge - into a wider consideration of the spiritual strength of man.

To some such widened outlook we must gradually lead up, reviewing in turn the various forms - first of inhibition, then of dynamogeny - of which ordinary education, from the nursery onwards, is wont to consist.

527. The most rudimentary form of restraint or inhibition, as already said, lies in our effort to preserve the infant or young child from acquiring what we call "bad tricks." These morbid affections of motor centres, trifling in their inception, will sometimes grow until they are incurable by any régime or medicament; - nay, till an action so insignificant as sucking the thumb may work the ruin of a life.

In no direction, perhaps, do the results of suggestion appear more inexplicable than here. Nowhere - as the cases in my Appendices (527 A and B) show - have we a more conspicuous touching of a spring; - a more complete achievement, almost in a single moment, of the deliverance which years of painful effort have failed to effect.

These cases stand midway between ordinary therapeutics and moral suasion. No one can here doubt the importance of finding the shortest and swiftest path to cure. Nor is there any reason to think that cures thus obtained are less complete or permanent than if they had been achieved by gradual moral effort. These facts should be borne in mind throughout the whole series of the higher hypnotic effects, and should serve to dispel any anxiety as to the possible loss of moral training when cure is thus magically swift. Each of these effects consists, as we must suppose, in the modification of some group of nervous centres; and, so far as we can tell, that is just the same result which moral effort made above the conscious threshold more slowly and painfully attains. This difference, in fact, is like the difference between results achieved by diligence and results achieved by genius. Something valuable in the way of training, - some exercise in patience and resolve, - no doubt may be missed by the man who is "suggested" into sobriety; - in the same way as it was missed by the schoolboy Gauss, - writing down the answers to problems as soon as set, instead of spending on them a diligent hour.

But moral progress is in its essence as limitless as mathematical; and the man who is thus carried over rudimentary struggles may still find plenty of moral effort in life to train his character and tax his resolution.