CHAPTER V

THE LAW OF SUGGESTION (HISTORICAL)

A Law must be formulated in Terms indicating Universality before it can be made available for Scientific Purposes. — Antagonism of Conservative Science. - Opposition to Newton's Discovery. - The Laws of Duality of Mind and of Suggestion dimly perceived for Ages. The two Laws Necessary Concomitants of each other. The Recognition of their Relation a Prerequisite of their Formulation.- Jesus the First to promulgate the Law of Mental Healing. — His Declaration of the Therapeutic Potency of Faith confirmed by Modern Science. — Braid's Experiments in Hypnotism. — Liébault's Discovery of the Law of Suggestion. This Law incomplete without the Law of Dual Mind. The Importance of the Law of Suggestion outside the Field of Therapeutics.

T is axiomatic that nature's laws are of compar

advancement of human knowledge, until they have been formulated. Formulation presupposes generalization, and generalization presumes universality. This presumption, however, is subject always to further investigation and to consequent disproof, and it is disproved when an exceptional case is discovered; for nature's laws are immutable and admit of no exceptions. If, therefore, it is found not to be universal, it is not a law, and all conclusions based upon it must be revised. Nevertheless, a universal law must be formulated in terms indicating universality before it can be made generally

It may

available for scientific or practical uses. have been floating around loosely in human consciousness for ages, and it may have been found useful in specific cases by an indefinite number of individuals, and those individuals may each have formulated a law applicable to his own field of research; yet it is not universally available until some one collates the different classes of cases, and crystallizes the thought involved into a concrete form of human expression indicative of universality.

When this is once accomplished, however, such is the "conservatism of science," or the perversity of human nature, - the discovery is generally destined to encounter three successive stages of opposition. First, it is met by a universal shout of derision. When that fails to disprove it, as it sometimes does, everybody claims it as his own. When that is disproved, as it sometimes is, each claimant proceeds to cover himself with the dust of old libraries in an effort to prove that it was always known.

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Newton was not exempt from the usual course of opposition. His discovery was derided in scientific circles; he was encountered by rival claimants; volumes have been written to prove that there is no such force as the attraction of gravitation, and still others to prove that Newton did not discover gravity," the proof being that the term had been in common use long before Newton was born. Nevertheless, no one has yet succeeded in robbing Newton of the credit of the discovery that the force which the world has consented to designate as "gravitation" acts with an energy proportioned directly as to the mass and inversely as to the square

of the distance; and that the formula is as applicable to the apple which falls to the earth as it is to the movements of the planets. Nor is the lustre of his name dimmed in the slightest degree by the fact that his discovery was made possible only by Kepler's previous discovery of the laws of the planetary orbits; nor by the fact that the success of his work finally depended upon Picard's correction of the old measurement of a degree of the earth's surface. All great discoveries are necessarily the resultants of all previous subsidiary discoveries.

The laws of duality and suggestion furnish striking examples of laws dimly perceived for ages, used by many, discovered in subsidiary sections, so to speak, and finally formulated as a universal law, and thus rendered available for the uses of all mankind.

The great factor in the retardation of the final establishment of the two laws consisted in the fact that they are the necessary concomitants of each other. That is to say, suggestion is necessary to duality, and duality is indispensable to suggestion. In other words, a clear conception of the law of suggestion, as it manifested itself in its protean aspects, was impossible in the absence of the theory of duality; and, on the other hand, duality was inconceivable in the absence of some salient point of differentiation between the hypothetical two minds or states of consciousness; and suggestion furnished a point of differentiation so clear and unmistakable that duality became a logical as well as a psychological necessity. Necessarily, until this concomitant interrelation of the two laws was clearly perceived, and they were formulated together as necessary parts

of a psychological whole, the prevailing ideas on the subject were chaotic to the last degree.

Thus, the theory of duality has been dimly floating around in the minds of various philosophers, from the time when Greek philosophy ruled the intellectual world until the present age, without seriously affecting the trend of psychological thought. The phenomena indicating it were, of course, the same as they are now, and the theory was often tentatively advanced. But religious thought was apparently hostile to it, and the arguments of the Church were at the time considered unanswerable. Thus, John Locke,1 in discussing the phenomena of dreams, puts into the mouth of an opponent, real or imaginary, the following paragraph, which is now known to be substantially true.

"Perhaps it will be said," says Locke, "that in a waking man the materials of the body are employed, and made use of, in thinking; and that the memory of thoughts is retained by the impressions that are made on the brain, and the traces there left after such thinking; but that in the thinking of the soul, which is not perceived in a sleeping man, there the soul thinks apart, and making no use of the organs of the body, leaves no impression on it, and consequently no memory of such thoughts."

This position Mr. Locke strenuously repudiates, declares it absurd, and proceeds with an argument against it which, in turn, cannot now be characterized by any milder term than that which he applied to the dual hypothesis.

1 Human Understanding, vol. i. book ii. chap. i. p. 86, ed. 1884, London.

The history of the dual hypothesis, however, is of little interest or scientific importance compared with that of the slow development of the idea which culminated in the formulation of the law of suggestion.

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As I pointed out in the first chapter, Jesus of Nazareth was the first to give authoritative utterance to that divine law of mental healing which it has taken science nineteen hundred years to rediscover. Jesus was not a scientist, in the modern sense of the word, and he did not attempt to teach his followers by the employment of scientific terms. He simply told them the truth in language that they could comprehend; and when he stated to them that faith" was the mental attitude essential to successful mental healing, he epitomized in that one word the whole law of therapeutic suggestion. What is the essence of the law of suggestion? It certainly does not consist of a formula built up of words. Words are merely the vehicle of expression by which one may be made to comprehend the law. What, then, is the central idea embraced in the law of suggestion? It is simply that a certain belief, to wit, a belief in the efficacy of the particular therapeutic agency at hand, has a therapeutic potency. This is all that can be expressed in any form of words; and the word "faith," as Jesus employed it, conveyed the central idea so clearly that no one has ever mistaken its exact meaning.

Jesus expressed the same idea in different words when speaking of prayer: "Therefore I say unto you, All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye have received them, and ye shall have them.” 1

1 Mark xi. 24 (R. V.).