Religion and Psychology 315 



theories afterwards. We can say as a fact that suggestion produces 

 results, that auto-suggestion produces still more permanent results, 

 and that, ifgenuine faith is aroused, the most astounding results of 

 a permanent nature may be produced. In this sequence, looked 

 at psychologically, we see that the transition is from passivity to 

 activity, that faith as such is a form of volition, and that auto- 

 suggestion as such is not in conflict with volition, as M. Coue and 

 his followers have wrongly contended ; it is simply a completion of 

 volition. The so-called law of reversed effort, which Coue and his 

 followers have made famous, may be expressed in this form: "When 

 the will and the imagination are in conflict, the imagination 

 always wins." The conclusion would seem to be that imagina- 

 tion is stronger than will ; but in the French the word vouloir, 

 though sometimes meaning will, often means wish, and, so far as 

 one can make out in Coue's own brief writings, he is thinking 

 really of wish rather than of will. If there is a wish on the one 

 hand and imagination on the other, the imagination-result is more 

 likely to occur than the wish-result ; indeed, the situation is one of 

 frustrated will. The process of wishing is on the road towards 

 volition or will, but it has not yet reached the final stage of volition. 

 In that transition from wishing to willing or volition, the imagina- 

 tion, lighted up and intensified by fear or some other disturbing 

 emotion, slips in as it were, gets the lead, and prevents the wish 

 becoming the will. Imagination then wins because the will has 

 not been completed. On the other hand, that which has been 

 called auto-suggestion, and which I think is a definite attitude of 

 mind akin to faith, is a process of complete volition, turning mere 

 wish into will by adequate control of the imagination. 



This will become clear if we take an example. A patient 

 suffering from a fear of open spaces, called technically agoraphobia, 

 may be unable to walk a hundred yards down a wide street by him- 

 self or to cross it. As soon as he attempts to start on his journey, 

 his heart palpitates, he becomes breathless, tends to hug the wall, 

 becomes less and less able to move, is glued to the spot, and has 

 to give up and return home. Such a patient may be encouraged 

 by his relatives and friends to pull himself together and to make 

 a real effort, and may be told that if he makes an adequate effort 

 he will succeed in getting over thisd ifficulty. But he finds, on 

 the contrary, that the greater the effort the worse the situation 

 becomes, the harder ne tries the less he succeeds. This seems to 



