Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/369

No. 3.] family is free from this danger. Is there a remedy? L. thinks that one exists, and that it is found in what he calls "suggestion atténuée" If, having hypnotized a very suggestible person, one suggests to him that hereafter nobody will be able to hypnotize him, the announced result takes place. It holds true of all but the experimenter himself. Every one should ascertain to what degree he is suggestible. If the result is negative, he may be perfectly at ease. Otherwise it is absolutely essential that a competent and honorable person should suggest to him that in the future nobody, by any means whatever, shall be able to hypnotize him or make suggestions to him. This "suggestion atténuée" is a sort of moral vaccination.

The social contract theory did not originate with the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had its roots in the popular consciousness of mediæval society, and had been anticipated by the Greek Sophists. In the popular consciousness of the middle ages, and among writers on the ecclesiastical side, there grew up that particular form of the contract theory which has fixed itself most prominently in the minds of ordinary men — the idea of a contract between government and people. Locke published his Treatise of Civil Government in defence of the principles of the revolution of 1688, and it is commonly believed that he maintained this theory of a contract between king and people; but the original compact on which he bases civil government is, just as with Hobbes and with Rousseau, a compact between individual and individual, not between government (of whatever sort) and people. If the person or persons entrusted with the government fail to give satisfaction, they may be dismissed and others put in their place. This is identical with what is most essential in Rousseau's theory. The latter says explicitly that the institution of government is not a contract: the social contract by which the sovereign people is constituted excludes every other. Rousseau has this advantage over Locke that he does not attempt to make out an historical justification for the social contract. The philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who held this theory, did not borrow it directly from the Greeks. Hooker implicitly united the two distinct theories that political society is based upon contract and that the people is sovereign — the theories held later by Locke and Rousseau. Locke purposely based his political thinking upon Hooker, because Hooker was an authority acceptable to the Anglican Tories with whom he had to argue. But historical events were making the idea of compact