557. Such an expectation is hardly legitimate without something of closer analysis. With no pretence at logic, but merely for the convenience of the present argument, we may divide known faults or sins into the four following classes: -

(1) Bodily sins depending on specific temptation, as drunkenness, etc. These, as we have seen, can generally be reached by suggestion.

(2) Faults associated with gross congenital defects of organisms.

These also can be reached in surprising degree.

(3) Faults depending on an idée fixe. Jealousy is the type of such a fault. All jealousy, we may say, is morbid; that I should hate B. simply because A. prefers B. to myself is the rational result of an insistent association of ideas which appropriate suggestion has sometimes demolished at a stroke.

(4) Sins deliberately maintained for the supposed advantage of the sinner. Now the first three of these are faults from which the afflicted person generally, although not always, earnestly desires to be free. The jealous person, like the drunkard, can often recognise that beneath the morbid insistence there is a stratum of cool self-reproval; - an ideal of life with the morbid craving removed. It is where that subjacent wish for improvement exists that suggestion can get an adequate hold (see 557 A).

558. This last observation affords a hint as to the kind of moral faults which suggestion can be expected to cure. As a matter of experience thus far, we find that the sins which popular theology attributes to the flesh, rather than those which are credited to the world or to the devil, have been the readiest to disappear. If we expand our definition of the flesh to include not only faults of self-indulgence but also faults of sloth and cowardice on the one hand, and faults of hastiness and irascibility on the other, - such failings as obviously vary with the state of the bodily organism, - we shall include, I think, almost all attested moral cures.

There remains the fourth class of sins, namely, sins deliberately maintained for the supposed advantage of the sinner.

Are we to suppose that the effect of suggestion is necessarily limited to the three earlier categories? Must we despair of reaching our fourth class of faults, - the deep-seated sins such as hardness, selfishness, treachery, spiritual pride ? There is no à priori reason for such a distinction. However remote from the so-called "flesh," all moral faults alike may probably have some counterpart in the organism; and, if so, all should be modifiable by the same subliminal attack.

Nor have we any experimental proof that these "worldly and devilish " sins are not in fact capable of similar cure by suggestion. The absence of notable cures may be sufficiently explained by two facts, already hinted at, namely, that the sufferers from these defects are seldom anxious to have them removed; and that if they are thus anxious they are not likely to consult a physician, but rather to seek support of a directly moral or religious kind.

The mental attitude, say, of the fraudulent trustee is very different from that of the dipsomaniac. The dipsomaniac feels himself wholly un-suited to his environment; beneath all his morbid craving the instinct of self-preservation bids him to desist. The fraudulent man, on the other hand, has in one sense adapted himself with special skill to his temporary environment. I say his temporary environment; - reverting to the comparison of man on earth to the larva, of man after bodily death to the imago. Selfishness, hardness, treachery (as I have said) are like the clumps of stinging hairs with which the caterpillar is protected; and the selfish man is like a caterpillar which has so developed those protective larval characters that it has no energy left for transformation into the imago.

We cannot reckon on any instinct of self-preservation to make him wish for change of character; although we may hope that in every man some subliminal consciousness of his connection with another world persists.

559. And here we approach a point of much interest. Hypnotic suggestion or self-suggestion, although it is an agency in great part unexplained, is of course not an agency which stands wholly alone and separate from all other influences. It melts into the suasion of ordinary life; - into modes of influence which were practised before hypnotism was dreamt of. The physician (as we have seen) has extended his domain by becoming a confessor and a counsellor as well; he has utilised for moral ends the authority with which his scientific knowledge has invested him.

But there are already other persons wielding with authority this suasive power, and it is, as I have above implied, to ministers of religion rather than to physicians that a man turns who is conscious of sin rather than of disease.

There must of course be a connection between all these suasive processes. Can we find any intermediate instances; - cases where religious conviction seems to be communicated with the rapidity and decision of hypnotic suggestion?

I need not say that there are many such instances. From the rude animistic dances and ceremonies of the savage up to the "missions " and "revivals" in English and American churches and chapels, we find sudden and exciting impressions on mind and sense called into play for the purpose of producing religious and moral change; and sometimes actually producing not only - what from the analogy of hypnotic suggestion seems comparatively easy - a change of belief, but also - what is far harder - a change of habits. Among the lower races especially these exciting reunions often involve both hysterical and hypnotic phenomena. There are sometimes convulsive accesses; and there is sometimes the milder, and probably wholly healthy, phenomenon of a deep restorative sleep, out of which the anxious and repentant neophyte awakes with a sense of settled conviction and of peace. The influence which has been exerted upon him is thus intermediate between hypnotic artifice, dependent on trance-states for access to subliminal plasticity, and ordinary moral suasion, addressed primarily to ordinary waking reason.

This, of course, is what we must desire; - that the series of influences should thus be continuous; that hypnotism should be regarded as simply a systematisation of artifices by which a man's own self-suggestive power, the will which he exerts over his own organism, - should become continually more potent for both his moral and his physical good.