This third view seems justified by the facts that no sharp line can be drawn between the suggestibility of normal men and that of hypnotized or hysterical subjects, and that under favourable conditions many of the most striking results of suggestion (e.g., hallucinations, contractures, inability to move, insensibility of various sense-organs, and so forth) may be produced in subjects who present at the time no other symptom of the hypnotic or hysterical condition.
If, then, we recognize, as we must, that the alogical produc tion of conviction is the essence of suggestion, and that this fre quently occurs in normal minds as well as in those suffering from various degrees of dissociation, it becomes necessary to define the conditions which are resident, on the one hand, in the recipient of the suggestion, and, on the other hand, in the source from which the suggestion comes.
(a) Defect of knowledge. The usual well-trained mind is relatively insuggestible, firstly because it possesses large stores of knowledge and belief ; secondly, because this mass of knowl edge and belief is systematically organized in such a way that all its parts hang together and mutually support one another. On the other hand, the young child, the uncultured adult, and espe cially the savage, are apt to be suggestible in regard to very many topics, firstly, because they have relatively little knowledge; secondly, because what little they have is of a low degree of organization; i.e., it does not form a logically coherent system whose parts reciprocally support one another. Suggestion in such cases may be said to be conditioned by primitive credulity or the suggestibility of ignorance. (b) But the same person will not be found to be equally suggestible at all times under similar ex ternal conditions. A man is least suggestible when his mind works most efficiently; every departure from this state, due to fatigue, bodily ill-health, emotional perturbation, drugs or any other cause, favours suggestibility. (c) Persons of equal degrees of knowledge or ignorance will be found, even at their times of greatest mental efficiency, to be unequally suggestible owing to differences of native disposition; one person is by nature more open than another to personal influence, more easily swayed by others, more ready to accept their dicta and adopt their opinions for his own. Differences of this kind are probably the expression
of differences in the native strength of one of the fundamental instinctive dispositions of the human mind.
Considered from the side of the agent, suggestion is favoured by whatever tends to render him impressive to the subject or patient—great bodily strength or stature, fine clothes, a con fident manner, superior abilities of any kind, age and experience, any reputation for special capacities, high social position or the occupation of any position of acknowledged authority; in short, all that is summed up by the term "personality," all that con tributes to make a personality "magnetic" or to give it prestige renders it capable of evoking on the part of others the submissive suggestible attitude. A group of persons in agreement is capable of evoking the suggestible attitude far more effectively than any single member of the group, and the larger the group the more strongly does it exert this influence. Hence the suggestive force of the popularly accepted maxims and well-established social conventions ; such propositions are collective suggestions which carry with them all the immense collective prestige of organized society, both of the present and the past ; they embody the wisdom of the ages. It is in the main through the suggestive power of moral maxims, endowed with all the prestige of great moral teachers and of the collective voice of society, that the child is led to accept with but little questioning the code of morals of his age and country; and the propagation of all religious and other dogma rests on the same basis. The normal suggestibility of the child is thus a principal condition of its docility, and it is in the main by the operation of normal suggestion that society moulds the characters, sentiments and beliefs of its members, and renders the mass of its elements harmonious and homogeneous to the degree that is a necessary condition of its collective mental life. Normal suggestion produces its most striking effects in the form of mass-suggestion, i.e., when it operates in large assemblies or crowds, especially if the members have but little positive knowledge and culture.