SUGGESTION IN THERAPEUTICS. 353 



koff. The professor, however, adds sorae important points bear- 

 ing upon the case : The patient is of neurotic temperament ; his 

 sister is highly hysterical ; he had frequently had boils on both 

 arms with a marked tendency to symmetry in position ; and the 

 sycosis itself showed some signs of being, if not of nervous origin, 

 at least under nervous influence. The impressive surroundings 

 under which the ' cure ' was wrought, and the mysterious caba- 

 listic prayer — which the woman refused to divulge, lest it should 

 begin to act with the person to whom she told it and cease to 

 act with herself — are also factors to be remembered in connec- 

 tion with the neurotic -and impressionable character of the pa- 

 tient." 



I might extend this catalogue almost indefinitelj'', but my space 

 is limited. What shall we say of these facts ? It is evident that 

 they can not be explained by our present psycho-physiological the- 

 ories, and many other attempts at explanation have been offered. 

 The Roman Catholic ascribes them to the supernatural interven- 

 tion of the Virgin or saints ; the evangelical Christian sees in them 

 the power of God, and an attempt has been made in recent years 

 by the "faith healers" to make them an essential part of an 

 evangelical creed in which " faith " is the divinely ordained instru- 

 ment, not merely for the purification of the soul from sin, but for 

 the deliverance of the body from disease as well. The self-styled 

 " Christian scientists " and " metaphysical healers " approach the 

 question from a pseudo-idealistic point of view. Mind, say they, 

 is the only reality ; things are nothing but very stable thoughts ; 

 the body exists only because the soul thinks it ; disease is there- 

 fore merely a pernicious fixed idea : abolish the idea, and the dis- 

 ease is ipso facto abolished. 



It is impossible for any one who has been trained in the study 

 of natural phenomena to revert to such crude theories as these. 

 The " scientific " man, to whom nothing is intelligible unless it is 

 capable of interpretation in the mechanical conceptions of our 

 latter-day atomism, usually finds it simpler to deny all facts which 

 he cannot at once bring under those conceptions. He forgets that 

 experience is the only test of truth, that our scientific conceptions 

 are merely the tools which the human mind has devised in order 

 to grapple with the infinite manifold of experience. They are good 

 tools. They are as much better than the animistic conceptions 

 of primitive man as our modern machinery is better than his 

 axes and chisels of stone ; yet our mental as well as our material 

 tools can be improved. There are, I believe, engineering feats 

 which our present appliances can not accomplish, and there are 

 also, I believe, phenomena of Nature which our present concep- 

 tions are insuflQcient to explain. Yet I would not pronounce the 

 former impossible or the latter essentially unintelligible. 



VOL. XLIX. 30 



