h, etc., may not be more helpful here,
when wisely employed, than in troubles which do not involve the mind;
but yet the end to be attained is a physical as well as a mental cure,
and the means in the present state of knowledge, at any rate, are
mainly physical means. The psychologist knows practically nothing
about the laws which govern the influence of mind on body. The
principle of Suggestion is so obscure in its concrete working that the
most practised and best-informed operators find it impossible to
control its use or to predict its results. To give countenance, in
this state of things, to any pretended system or practice of mind
cure, Christian science, spiritual healing, etc., which leads to the
neglect of ordinary medical treatment, is to discredit the legitimate
practice of medicine and to let loose an enemy dangerous to the public
health.

Moreover, such things produce a form of hysterical subjectivism which
destroys sound judgment, and dissolves the sense of reality which it
has taken modern science many generations to build up. Science has all
along had to combat such wresting of its more obscure and unexplained
facts into alliance with the ends of practical quackery, fraud, and
superstition; and psychologists need just now to be especially alive
to their duty of combating the forms of this alliance which arise when
the newer results of psychology are so used, whether it be to
supplement the inadequate evidence of "thought-transference," to
support the claims of spiritualism, or to justify in the name of
"personal liberty" the substitution of a "healer" for the trained
physician. The parent who allows his child to die under the care of a
"Christian Science healer" is as much a criminal from neglect as the
one who, going but a step further in precisely the same direction,
brings his child to starvation on a diet of faith. In France and
Russia experimenting in hypnotism on well persons has been restricted
by law to licensed experts; what, compared with that, shall we say to
this wholly amateurish experimenting with the diseased? Let the
"healer" heal all he can, but let him not experiment to the extremity
of life and death with the credulity and superstition of the people
who think one "doctor" is as good as another.

Second, many experts agree that diseases of the mind, whatever their
brain seat may be, all involve impairment of the Attention. This, at
any rate, is a general mark of a deranged or defective