SOME RELATIONS OF MIND AND BODY. 165- 



So in the brain. (4) I may set to work to think of my little 

 finger, and so start sensations in it wliich, if not actual pain, 

 are still sensations. But if I have the idea it is injured,, 

 though it may not be, I may feel the pain acutely from 

 an idea alone. A butcher, pale, pulseless, and suffering 

 acute agony, as he said, in his arm, was brought the other 

 day into a chemist's shop. His cries were dreadful, for 

 he had slipped in hooking a heavy piece of beef, and 

 ■was suspended by his arm on the sharp hook ; and yet when 

 the arm was exposed it was uninjured, the hook having only 

 caught in the sleeve. (5) But, again, the pain may have 

 been originally caused by a gathering in the little finger,, 

 and afterwards kept up long after the gathering v/as gone 

 by the ideal centre. (6) Association, as seeing others with 

 crushed little fingers; or (7) memories, conscious or un- 

 conscious, of crushed little fingers, may also start and keep 

 up this pain. Observe, then, the varied causes with th& 

 same effect. Only, in conclusion, we may add that while in 

 health it is generally easy to discriminate between pain in 

 the little finger caused by injury to the little finger from that 

 set up in other ways, in nerve disease, where the sub- 

 conscious mind, has greater sway, it is not. Nay, it is some- 

 times impossible not only to the sufferer, but to the doctor 

 who attends him. 



We have dwelt upon mimetic, or imitative, hysteria,, 

 because it shows the wojiderful powers of the sub-con- 

 scious mind over the body for evil, as nothing else does, 

 simulating every known disease, including tumours, deaf- 

 ness, bhndness, dumbness, paralysis, St. Vitus's dance, &c., 

 and is capable of producing the highest temperatures of 

 fevers. Now if the range of psycho-physical ailments is 

 large, the power of mental therapeutics to cure them is 

 equally great, though much less known. Tlie same sub-con- 

 scious mind that produces the disease can be used to cure 

 it. If the person is in other ways in good health, and has 

 not entered the vicious circle of dyspepsia and debility, he 

 can probably be cured in a short time, without isolation, 

 going to bed, or any form of long treatment. Anyhow the 

 cure must be effected in one of the three ways already 

 indicated. Perhaps he may be cured instantaneously 

 by applying to the irritated ideal centres, that keep up 

 the disease, good suggestions consciously or sub-consciously 

 sufficiently powerful to overcome the bad ones. We have 

 no belief in their application by means of hypnotism, which 



