s force is useful to each one of us, but it is
peculiarly indispensable to doctors, magistrates, lawyers, and to
those engaged in the work of education.

By knowing how to practise it _consciously_ it is possible in the
first place to avoid provoking in others bad autosuggestions which
may have disastrous consequences, and secondly, consciously to
provoke good ones instead, thus bringing physical health to the sick,
and moral health to the neurotic and the erring, the unconscious
victims of anterior autosuggestions, and to guide into the right path
those who had a tendency to take the wrong one.

THE CONSCIOUS SELF AND THE UNCONSCIOUS SELF

In order to understand properly the phenomena of suggestion, or to
speak more correctly of autosuggestion, it is necessary to know that
two absolutely distinct selves exist within us. Both are intelligent,
but while one is conscious the other is unconscious. For this reason
the existence of the latter generally escapes notice. It is however
easy to prove its existence if one merely takes the trouble to
examine certain phenomena and to reflect a few moments upon
them. Let us take for instance the following examples:

Every one has heard of somnambulism; every one knows that a
somnambulist gets up at night _without waking_, leaves his room
after either dressing himself or not, goes downstairs, walks along
corridors, and after having executed certain acts or accomplished
certain work, returns to his room, goes to bed again, and shows next
day the greatest astonishment at finding work finished which he had
left unfinished the day before.

It is however he himself who has done it without being aware of it.
What force has his body obeyed if it is not an unconscious force, in
fact his unconscious self?

Let us now examine the alas, too frequent case of a drunkard
attacked by _delirium tremens_. As though seized with madness he
picks up the nearest weapon, knife, hammer, or hatchet, as the case
may be, and strikes furiously those who are unlucky enough to be in
his vicinity. Once the attack is over, he recovers his senses and
contemplates with horror the scene of carnage around him, without
realizing that he himself is the author of it. Here again is it not the
unconscious self which has caused the unhappy man to act in this
way? [*]

[*] And what aversions, what ills we create for ourselves, everyone
of us and in every domain by not "immediately" bringing into play
"good conscio