582. If this be so, there may be a truth - deeper than we can at this moment stay to discuss - in many subjective experiences of poets, philosophers, mystics, saints. And if their sense of inflowing and indwelling life indeed be true; - if the subliminal uprushes which renew and illumine them are fed in reality from some metetherial environment; - then a similar influence may by analogy exist and be recognisable along the whole gamut of psychophysical phenomena; - not only in the realm of high spiritual emotions, but wheresoever there is a quickening and an elevation of even our lower organic life. The nascent life of each of us is perhaps a fresh draft, - the continued life is an ever-varying draft, - upon the cosmic energy. In that environing energy - call it by what name we will - we live and move and have our being; and it may well be that certain dispositions of mind, certain phases of personality, may draw in for the moment from that energy a fuller vitalising stream.

On this hypothesis there will be an essential concordance between all views - spiritual or materialistic - which ascribe to any direction of attention or will any practical effect upon the human organism. "The prayer of faith shall save the sick," says St. James. "There is nothing in hypnotism but suggestion," says Bernheim. In my clumsier language these two statements (setting aside a possible telepathic element in St. James' words) will be expressible in identical terms. "There will be effective therapeutical or ethical self-suggestion whenever by any artifice subliminal attention to a bodily function or to a moral purpose is carried to some unknown pitch of intensity which draws energy from the metetherial world".

583. A great practical question remains, to which St. James' words supply a direct, though perhaps an inadequate answer, while Bernheim's words supply no answer at all.

What is this saving faith to be, and how is it to be attained? Can we find any sure way of touching the spring which moves us so potently, at once from without and from within ? Can we propose any form of self-suggestion effective for all the human race? any controlling thought on which all alike can fix that long-sought mountain-moving faith?

Assuredly no man can extemporise such a faith as this. Whatever form it may ultimately take, it must begin as the purification, the intensification, of the purest, the intensest beliefs to which human minds have yet attained. It must invoke the whole strength of all philosophies, of all religions; - not indeed the special arguments or evidence adduced for each, which lie outside my present theme, but all the spiritual energy by which in truth they live. And so far as this purpose goes, of drawing strength from the unseen, if one faith is true, all faiths are true; in so far at least as human mind can grasp or human prayer appropriate the unknown metetherial energy, the inscrutable Grace of God.

The mystery of these extreme phenomena of suggestion is certainly not thus fully solved. No more than my predecessors have I been able to explain why it is that certain organisms at certain moments should become thus superior to themselves; - capable of a response so vigorous, submissive to a control so profound. But I have set forth a point of view which helps towards the subsumption of this minor mystery under a mystery of universal scope and world-old experience. I have placed "suggestion," I think, in a truer relation to other forms of external suasion or internal will than the Nancy School have done. They have spoken as though suggestion were comparable with supraliminal suasion, supraliminal endeavour. I have tried to show that its real efficacy lies among subliminal processes; - as an empirical facilitation of our absorption of spiritual energy or acquisition of directive force from a metetherial environment. Large and assumptive as this definition may seem to be, it is not too wide for nascent phenomena which already include mind-cure and the miracles of Lourdes as well as ordinary hypnotic practice.

And it suggests - what narrower definitions have not yet suggested - the possibility of a world-wide faith, or set of the human spirit, which may make for an ever more potent mastery over organic hindrance and physical ill. Let the great currents of belief run gradually into a deeper channel. Let men realise that their most comprehensive duty, in this or other worlds, is intensity of spiritual life; nay, that their own spirits are co-operative elements in the cosmic evolution, are part and parcel of the ultimate vitalising Power.