550. And now I come to the third main type of the dynamogenic efficacy of suggestion; - its influence, namely, on attention, on will, and on character; - character, indeed, being largely a resultant of the direction and persistence of voluntary attention.

It will be remembered that for convenience' sake I have discussed the dynamogenic effect of suggestion first upon the external senses, then upon the internal sensibility, - the mind's eye, the mind's ear, and the imagination generally; - and now I am turning to similar effects exercised upon that central power which reasons upon the ideas and images which external and internal senses supply, which chooses between them, and which reacts according to its choice. These are the "highest-level centres," which I began by saying that the hypnotist could rarely hope to reach; - since those spontaneous somnambulisms which the hypnotic trance imitates and develops do so seldom reach them. The phenomena which here follow, therefore, lie beyond our original ground of hope. They show that the hypnotic range is wider than the somnambulic; - how much wider, experience alone can show. The step which we are making here, though a considerable one, is not a sudden one. We have already found a good deal of intelligence of a certain kind in hypnotic phenomena; what we do here is to pass from one stage to another and higher stage of consciousness of intelligent action.

To explain my point, I may roughly say that there are three habitual degrees of such consciousness, as follows: - (a) I do not at all know how I supply my arm with blood. That is an organic process wholly below my conscious level. (b) I know in a certain sense how I move my arm. That is an organic process associated with certain conscious sensations of choice and will, (c) Given this fact that I am moving my arm, I can understand, more fully than at those previous stages, how I am writing words on paper. In that action there is a larger element of acquired capacity and conscious choice. And I wish to explain that the forward step which we are making in this section is, in fact, a carrying on of the results of suggestion from stage (b) to stage (c) - from a point at which there is but a small element resembling conscious choice to a point where that element is important and complex.

To explain this statement, let us dwell for a moment upon the degree of intelligence which we have already seen displayed in those modifications of the organism which suggestion has effected. Take, for instance, the formation of a cruciform blister, as recorded by Dr. Biggs, of Lima (543 B). That performance needed an unusual combination of capacities; - the capacity of directing physiological changes in a new way, and also, and combined therewith, the capacity of recognising and imitating an abstract, arbitrary, non-physiological idea, such as that of cruciformity.

All this, in my view, is the expression of subliminal control over the organism - more potent and profound than supraliminal. Or here, perhaps, in order to give some concreteness to this abstract expression, I may describe this increased physiological modifiability as a recovery of primitive plasticity. Not that this really is a simple idea; for we do not know how or why that early plasticity of the indefinite amoeba, the claw-renewing crab, has been lost by higher animals. We have no notion what kind of change would be needed to enable a higher animal to take that plasticity on again.

The problem here presented on a larger scale has some resemblance to the individual problems involved in such histories of alternating personality as Louis Vive's (233 A). That partially paralysed and otherwise much damaged young man could be put back by certain artifices into his state of uninjured boyhood, - "before the viper bit him," and his long series of troubles began. His paralysis disappeared in a moment, and there was thus a real recovery of plasticity, - of power of many kinds over his organism. If we ask how those powers came to have been so long obscured, the only answer is hysterical self-suggestion. Can it be some kind of self-suggestion which prevents the mammal from crediting himself with crustacean recuperativeness? Or, in more sober language, do not these experiments in suggestive blistering show that there does still persist in us a potential control over reparative secretions much greater than the common experience of life is apt to reveal to us?

This dormant plasticity, then, the hypnotic suggestions reawaken. But now consider with what degree of intelligence, of directive choice, they reawaken it. They reawaken it neither blindly nor wisely, but with intelligent caprice. The plasticity, I say first, is not blindly and vaguely restored; the vesication is localised on a pre-arranged plan, the rest of the body remaining unchanged. Nor, on the other hand, is the plasticity restored with perfect wisdom; in lima S.'s case, for instance (543 D), the vesication is annoying to the subject, who would have gladly avoided it. The order given for specifically shaped blisters is a capricious one; but in each case the capricious order is intelligently obeyed. Bizarre as this result may seem, it is very much what might have been expected on the theory suggested at the beginning of this chapter. It is a result of the action of middle-level centres putting into exercise subliminal powers.

I have chosen this point in my argument for a brief analysis of the intelligence involved in the vaso-motor effects of suggestion, just because we are now going on to suggestions more directly affecting central faculty, and in which, as I have said, highest-level centres begin to be involved. For I want to prepare the reader for an intermediate stage in which high faculties are used, in obedience to suggestion, for purely capricious ends.