THE EMMANUEL MOVEMENT 365 



Furthermore, it must be observed that these are the cases in which 

 psychotherapy, whether practised by means of the placebo, or through 

 the agency of christian science, or the Emmanuel movement, is pre- 

 eminently successful. 



In the second place, if we study carefully the causes of these condi- 

 tions, we shall find them in the two great classes into which Charcot 

 has divided them. " The neuroses," he says, " arise from two factors, 

 the one essential and invariable, neuropathic heredity; the other, con- 

 tingent and polymorphic, the provoking agent." 



In the latter belong our doubts and fears and worries, as well as the 

 other more easily controlled factors in the causation of these purely 

 functional nervous disorders. But even in the case of heredity, it is 

 more the unstable nervous equilibrium that is transmitted than the 

 specific form in which it is manifested in any individual case ; and this 

 unstable equilibrium is capable, in no small degree, of being influenced 

 by reeducation along the lines of which we have been speaking. 



" In neurasthenia," says Dubois, " we find general debility ; some- 

 times it is physical, sometimes intellectual, but above all it is moral." 

 In other words, it is a wrong view-point, a weakness of the will power 

 of the individual, an inability to throw off the unduly insistent habit, 

 or thought, or motive. 



In a few words, Carpenter explains the long list of epidemic 

 delusions of history, the form of which has changed from time to 

 time, although many of their characteristics have been common to all; 

 such as mesmerism, magnetism, spiritualism and the like, by saying 

 that " The condition which underlies them all is the subjection of the 

 mind to a dominant idea." 



The trouble is that in the case of these delusions, as well as in the 

 case of the neurasthenic, the dominant idea is pointed in the wrong 

 direction; and the Emmanuel movement simply aims by a process of 

 reeducation through suggestion, autosuggestion or, if necessary, hypno- 

 tism, to change this direction. 



In the treatment of these cases of functional disorder of the nervous 

 system, doctors, psychologists and Emmanuelists, all agree in attempting 

 to continue the subjection of the mind to a dominant idea; but try, 

 each in his own way, to make that idea stand for health, for right living 

 and right thinking, for cheerfulness, in a word, so to direct it that it 

 shall always look for the doughnut, not the hole. 



But, while agreeing thus far, a fundamental difference of opinion 

 is disclosed, as soon as we take up the question as to by whom this work 

 can best be done ; by the doctor or by the clergyman. The lines, how- 

 ever, are not strictly drawn between the two professions, because some 

 medical men see no impropriety in asking and encouraging the assist- 

 ance of the church, while many churchmen deprecate the entrance 



