Page:The Source and Aim of Human Progress.djvu/19

Rh from the inferior nerve-centers, followed by an increase of ideo-sensory, ideo-motor, sensori-secretory, reflex excitability; and ideationally, or rationally by an abnormal intensity and extensity of suggestibility. In order to bring to the fore subconscious activities with their reflex, automatic psycho-motor reactions by removal of the upper consciousness I have found requisite, in my investigations, the following conditions:

Normal Suggestibility,—Suggestibility in the Normal, Waking State:


 * 1) Fixation of the Attention.
 * 2) Distraction of the Attention.
 * 3) Monotony.
 * 4) Limitation of Voluntary Activity.
 * 5) Limitation of the Field of Consciousness.
 * 6) Inhibition.
 * 7) Immediate Execution of the Suggestion.

Abnormal Suggestibility,—Suggestibility in Hypnotic and Trance States:


 * 1) Fixation of the Attention.
 * 2) Monotony.
 * 3) Limitation of Voluntary Activity.
 * 4) Limitation of the Field of Consciousness.
 * 5) Inhibition.

The nature of abnormal suggestibility, the result of my investigations given in the same volume, is a disaggregation of consciousness, a cleavage of the mind, a cleft that may become ever deeper and wider, ending in a total disjunction of the waking, guiding, controlling guardian-consciousness from the automatic, reflex, subconscious consciousness. . . . Normal suggestibility is of like nature,—it is a cleft in the mind; only here the cleft is not so deep, not so lasting as in hypnosis or in the other subconscious trance states; the split is here but momentary; the mental cleavage, or the psycho-physiological disaggregation of the superior from the inferior centres with their concomitant psychic activities is evanescent, fleeting, often disappearing at the moment of its appearance.

In the same work the following laws of suggestibility were formed by me:

1. Normal suggestibility varies as indirect suggestion and inversely as direct suggestion.