No patient wishes to be impotent, but he becomes so because he expects the calamity; it is the same with stammering.

We can readily understand that the fulfilment of an expectation may be hindered, especially by impediments of organic nature. However much a sufferer from severe myelitis may expect his paralyzed legs to move they will not do so, because the anatomical changes in his spinal cord present an impediment which cannot be overcome by expectation. There are other impediments which hinder expectation from taking effect. But this does not disprove the fact that belief has a tendency to produce an effect. The efficacy of a tendency may be impaired, but the tendency as such will remain unaffected.

The influence of belief - the phenomenon we have just been discussing - is not confined to its effect on the voluntary muscular system. Its range is much wider than could be gathered from the examples already given. Menstruation, for instance, is affected by it. Forel mentions that there are certain popular methods of retarding the catamenia. In one town many of the young women tie something round their little finger if they wish to delay menstruation for a few days in order to go to a ball, etc. The method is generally effectual.

It has also been observed that belief influences the organs of sense under particular circumstances. The following case of Carpenter's is related by Bentivegni: - A judicial disinterment was to be made; the grave was opened and the coffin raised; the official present said that he already smelt putrefaction; but when the coffin was opened it was found to be empty. Here expectation caused a distinct sense-perception. Archibald tells of a teacher who described various perfumes to the children in his class, and then told them that he would sprinkle something about the room. Although he only used pure water, 95 per cent, of the children declared that they could smell scent. Somewhat older children were not quite so susceptible to suggestion, though not altogether wanting in susceptibility. Yung has made a series of experiments and has proved that the sense of touch and the sense of temperature, particularly the latter, are subject to delusion, and that certain perceptions occur when they are expected without external stimuli. I myself have often repeated the following experiments of Braid, Weinhold and others: - I blindfolded certain persons, doctors among the number, and then told them that they were going to be mesmerized.

Even when I did not mesmerize them they generally imagined they felt the current of air caused by the passes, and believed they could tell the exact moment when the passes were begun. Here we see expectation produce a perception. Many people begin to feel the pain of an operation almost before the knife has touched them, simply because their whole attention is fixed upon the pain and the beginning of the operation.

It is upon the simultaneous development of the two characteristics of the human mind which we have just described - viz., the tendency to believe without logical proof, and the influence of belief on the human organism - that suggestion depends. The phenomena they present occur often enough in non-hypnotic states; and even if we are obliged to admit that any inordinate intensification of their activity is only observed in hypnosis, we should have to desert the safe ground of reality if we wished to limit that activity to hypnosis alone* I have already discussed the various definitions of suggestion (p. 64 et seq.), and I must refer the reader to the explanations which I then gave for a proof that influences which a superficial observer considers only effectual in hypnosis may be equally so in every-day life. Hofler thinks that we should only speak of suggestion when a judgment is formed or a wish executed in a way that is not quite normal, the power of judgment and the energy of the will being for the time partially in abeyance.

For example, he ascribes the effect of a doctor's assuring a patient, in a tone conveying complete personal conviction and truthfulness, "You will be well," to suggestive influence, because the patient cheerfully believes the statement without any proof of its accuracy. This view is quite justified. Only, we should remember that it is quite a common occurrence for a judgment to be formed or a wish fulfilled "in a way that is not quite normal" - a fact which psychologists are apt to overlook. We can also see that all that Bechterew, Lipps, William Hirsch and others have written on the "concept" suggestion still leaves suggestion a wide field of operation outside the domain of hypnosis. An examination of those theories which put the associative processes in the foreground, or of Dubois' and Vogt's definitions mentioned on page 66, shows at once that suggestion is not limited to hypnosis. No matter what definition we select, it will always be found that non-hypnotic states present processes analogous to those of hypnosis.

Sidis thinks that there must always be more or less resistance to suggestion; but this is wrong, whether the suggestion be hypnotic or post-hypnotic. As Hirschlaff very properly insists, those phenomena of waking life which arise from stupidity, superstition, feeble-mindedness, and fanaticism bear a great similarity to the phenomena of hypnosis. In all such cases there is suggestion, and the suggestion is accepted and carried out without hypnosis because of the subject's mental predisposition, and there is certainly no resistance. Lipps lays stress on the inclusion of the extraordinary in the concept suggestion, but that should not lead us to exaggerate. Many things appear extraordinary which are not so in reality. And we must admit that suggestive processes are of daily occurrence in ordinary life, unless we would dissociate phenomena which really belong together. Hellpach gives the following example: - If a man is told when he sits down to dinner that the food placed before him is unsavoury or dirty, and he experiences a momentary feeling of aversion, that is an ordinary phenomenon, and not a case of suggestion; if, however, this aversion is not dispelled by the food being of good quality, but increases to loss of appetite and nausea, then suggestion is at work.