rson cannot be protected by any
interdict; he may catch suggestions everywhere, any advertisement in the
newspaper and any display in the shop-window may overrun his own
intentions. What he needs is training in firmness. The application of
reenforced suggestion or even of hypnotism in the doctor's office is
even for him no possible source of danger.

On a higher level are objections which come from serious quarters and
which are not without sympathy with true science. In recent times this
opposition has repeatedly found eloquent expression. It is an objection
from the standpoint of morality, belonging therefore entirely to the
purposive view of the mind, but we have now reached a point where it is
our duty to do justice to this purposive view too. As long as we
discussed the problem entirely from the standpoint of the physician, no
other view of mental life except the causal one could be in question. As
soon as we look at it from the standpoint of the community, it becomes
our duty to bring the causal and the purposive view into harmony, and it
would be narrow and short-sighted simply to draw the practical
consequences of a naturalistic view of the mind without inquiring
whether or not serious interests in the purposive sphere are injured. If
there is moral criticism against suggestive therapy, it is the duty of
the community to consider it. This opposition argues as follows:
Hypnotic influence brings the patient under the will control of the
hypnotizer and thus destroys his own freedom. Whatever the patient may
reach in the altered states is reached without his own effort, while he
is the passive receiver of the other man's will. His achievement has
therefore no moral value, and if he is really cured of his drunkenness
or of his perverse habits, of his misuse of cocaine or of his criminal
tendencies, he has lost the right to be counted a moral agent. It would
be better if there were more suffering in the world than that the
existence of the moral will should be undermined.

No one ought to take such arguments lightly. The spirit which directs
them is needed more than anything else in our time of reaching out for
superficial goods. No one can insist too earnestly that life is worth
living only if it serves moral duties and moral freedom and is not
determined by pleasures and absence of pain only. Those who set forth
this argument are entirely willing to acknowledge the profound effect
which suggestive therapeutics may