Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/228

 2IO PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

and so many definitions have been given it by psychologists that it has little more precision in scientific than in popular usage. However, if all the varying scientific uses of the term be carefully considered, it becomes evident that it points to a fairly definite and highly important class of mental phe nomena. The essential characteristic of the process in dicated is that there is brought before the mind a presenta tion under such conditions as tend to secure its uncritical acceptance. Frequently it is an idea imparted by one per son to another, and this is the kind of suggestion in which we are particularly interested in this discussion. Or it may be an idea which the mind voluntarily calls up and main tains in the focus of attention until it dominates conscious ness, in which case the process is known as auto-suggestion. But however the presentation is made, the point is that it is made under conditions which tend to secure its uncritical acceptance, to give it exclusive right of way in the mind.

Before going further we should draw the important dis tinction between normal and abnormal suggestion. By normal suggestion is meant the influencing of people through securing their uncritical acceptance of ideas under ordi nary conditions and by ordinary means. Abnormal sugges tion is that which is used under the extraordinary condi tions of hysteria or hypnosis. Hysteria is an abnormal nerv ous condition very favourable to the uncritical acceptance of ideas ; and hypnosis is a state of abnormal suggestibility in duced by the use of certain kinds of suggestion. Just what that state is nobody really knows. In some respects it strikingly resembles ordinary sleep, and in other respects it is as strikingly dissimilar. The physiological conditions of hypnotism are very obscure, and about all that can be said with certainty as to the psychological conditions is that the self-direction of the subject is reduced to a very low degree; and when the trance is deepest, almost annihilated, though not quite. The control is transferred to another person, the operator. It is difficult to say whether the mob-state should be characterized as normal or abnormal, according to this

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