is really an agency for the
overcoming of disease. We may be interested in it from the standpoint of
religion or from the standpoint of psychology or from the standpoint of
ethnology. In every case we have to acknowledge that he who believes may
be cured. If we abstract first from the religious point of view and
consider the problem as a scientific one, we have to interpret all those
curative effects of belief as results of suggestion. The attitude of the
one who gives the suggestion has gone in the history of mankind through
all possible variations. He may have been filled with fervent belief,
rejecting any interpretation except the religious one, or he may have
produced the suggestion of belief almost with the intentions of a
physician who simply relies on the physiological effects of any
suggestion; and between these two extremes any number of steps is
possible. Moreover the suggestion may have been detached from any
personality and may have belonged to any symbol of religious energies,
like the relics of the Catholic Church. Even the most skeptical of
ethnologists ought to acknowledge that very little in this history of
religious psychotherapy points to a conscious fraud. Those shamans of
the savages from Siberia to South Africa, from Australia to Mexico, are
in ecstasies which make them really believe in the mysterious power of
their manipulations. The ethnologist finds indeed as most common
characteristics of all those primitive movements that those who cure
are chosen from among neurotics who by epileptic attacks or
hallucinations and obsessions are predisposed to feel themselves as
bearers of a higher mission.

Yet whether the attitude of the transmitter is religious or
half-scientific, is inspired or insincere, the receiver of the
suggestion is always in the same condition: he is believing in his cure
through religious influence and through his belief he is helped, if he
is helped at all. This uniformity does not exclude the fact that the
patients too may show a manifoldness of mental states. They may remain
in a completely waking state with reenforced suggestibility, or they may
go over into a drowsy or hypnoid state or deeply into a hypnotic state,
or may receive the suggestions as we saw even in sleep. Further their
minds may be entirely filled with fine religious emotions and the
therapeutic effect be only an appendix or, on the other hand, this
confident expectation of the relief from pain may be their ce