518. Self-suggestion, whatever this may really mean, is thus in most cases, whether avowedly or not, at the bottom of the effect produced. It has already been used most successfully, and it will probably become much commoner than it now is; - or, I should rather say (since every one no doubt suggests to himself when he is in pain that he would like the pain to cease), I anticipate that self-suggestion, by being in some way better directed, will become more effective, and that the average of voluntary power over the organism will rise to a far higher level than it at present reaches. I believe that this is taking place even now; and that certain schemes of self-suggestion, so to call them, are coming into vogue, where patients in large masses are supplied with effective conceptions, which they thus impress repeatedly upon themselves without the need of a hypnotiser's attendance on each occasion. I shall presently explain that the "Miracles of Lourdes" and the cures effected by "Christian Science" fall, in my view, under this category. We have here suggestions given to a quantity of more or less suitable people en masse, much as a platform hypnotiser gives suggestions to a mixed audience, some of whom may then be affected without individual attention from himself.

The suggestion of the curative power of the Lourdes water, for instance, is thus thrown out, partly in books, partly by oral addresses; and a certain percentage of persons succeed in so persuading themselves of that curative efficacy that when they bathe in the water they are actually cured.

These schemes of self-suggestion, as I have termed them, constitute one of the most interesting parts of my subject, and will need careful study at a later point. But here it is important to point out that in order to make self-suggestion operative, no strong belief or enthusiasm, such as those schemes imply, is really necessary. No recorded cases of self-suggestion, I think, are more instructive than those published by Dr. Hugh Wingfield in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. p. 279. (The paper was printed anonymously.) Dr. Wingfield was a Demonstrator in Physiology in the University of Cambridge, and his subjects were mainly candidates for the Natural Sciences Tripos. In these cases there was no excitement of any kind, and no previous belief. The phenomena occurred incidentally during a series of experiments on other points, and were a surprise to every one concerned. The results achieved were partly automatic writing and partly phenomena of neuro-muscular excitability; - stiffening of the arms, and so forth.

The passage quoted in 518 D goes far to prove Dr. Wingfield's general thesis (p. 283), "It seems probable that... all phenomena capable of being produced by the suggestion of the hypnotiser can also be produced by self-suggestion in a self-suggestive subject".

Experiments like these, - confirming with modern care the conclusions reached by Fahnestock (see 518 A) and others at various points in hypnotic history, - seem to me to open a new inlet into human faculty, as surprising in its way as those first wild experiments of Mesmer himself. Who would have supposed that a healthy undergraduate could " by an effort of mind throw his whole body into a state of cataleptic rigidity, so that he could rest with his heels on one chair and head on another, and remain supported in that condition"? or that other healthy young men could "close their own eyes so that they were unable to open them," and the like? The trivial character of these laboratory experiments makes them physiologically the more remarkable. There is the very minimum of predisposing conditions, of excited expectation, or of external motive prompting to extraordinary effort. And the results are not subjective merely - relief of pain and so on - but are definite neuro-muscular changes, capable of unmistakable test.

Yet, important though these and similar experiments in self-suggestion may be, they do not solve our problem as to the ultimate origin and distribution of the faculty thus displayed. We know no better with self-suggestion than with suggestion from outside why it is that one man succeeds where others fail, or why a man who succeeds once fails in his next attempt. Within the ordinary range of physiological explanations nothing (I repeat) has as yet been discovered which can guide us to the true nature or exciting causes of this characteristic responsiveness of hypnosis. If we are to find any light, it must be in some direction which has as yet been little explored.

519. The hint which I have to offer here involves, I hope, something more than a mere change of appellation. I define suggestion as "successful appeal to the subliminal self"; - not necessarily to that self in its most central, most unitary aspect; but to some one at least of those strata of subliminal faculty which I have in an earlier chapter described.

I do not indeed pretend that my explanation can enable us to reduce hypnotic success to a certainty. I cannot say why the process should be so irregular and capricious; so that now and then we seem to touch a spring which gives instant access to profound recesses; then all is closed and inaccessible again. But I can show that this puzzle is part of a wider problem, which meets us in all departments of subliminal operation. In split personalities, in genius, in dreams, in sensory and motor automatisms, we find the same fitfulness, the same apparent caprice. The answer to the problem of the uncertainty of hypnotism must be involved in the answer to all these other problems too. Hypnotic success or failure cannot depend, as some have fancied, on some superficial difference in the kind of suggestion given. It is part and parcel of a wider mystery; - of the obscure relationships and interdependencies of the supraliminal and the subliminal self.

For light upon such a problem as this we must wait, I believe, until a much later stage of our inquiry, when the possibility of the possession of the organism by a discarnate intelligence comes to be considered. As has been already observed, the acquisition of a standpoint - even of a somewhat unstable and shifting standpoint - outside the incarnate human personality should enable us, with clearer eyes, to see much which is now too intimate, too deeply rooted in us, for our unaided analysis.