Page:Medicine and the church; being a series of studies on the relationship between the practice of medicine and the church's ministry to the sick (IA medicinechurchbe00rhodiala).pdf/293

 reason can set the body in motion by commands issued through the brain and travelling down the motor nerves, so the departmental consciousness can initiate changes and disturbances in the various nerve centres with which it is associated. This, we take it, is what happens in all cases of mental healing. The phenomenon is physical as well as psychical; it consists not merely in the inhibition of the feeling of pain, but in such a modification of the nerve tissues as removes the cause of the pain. A real cure is effected, and it is effected by the action of the residual consciousness upon that particular part of the organism.

(3) This decentralised, residual consciousness can work best when the rational intellect is quiescent—when, we may say, the central office is closed. At such times man ceases for the time to be an argumentative, striving creature; the placid, vegetative, ruminative life, the life of growth and instinct, asserts itself; submerged modes of consciousness begin to stir and act, like fairies dancing when the sun has set.

And as sleep is the typically quiescent state, it will be specially in sleep, natural or induced, that these lower modes of consciousness will exhibit their activity.

(4) In order that they may act, a 'cue' or suggestion of some sort must be given to