modify their functional
disposition, induce trophic changes, and even change organic structure"
and this in a sentence is probably what lies behind all faith and mental
healing.--"The Psychology of Suggestion," pp. 69 and 70.]

The hypnotized person becomes, therefore, unconscious of any reporting
agencies outside the field of his abnormally focused attention. Normal
conditions of pain or pleasure cease for the time to become real.
Attention has been forced entirely out of normal channels and given a
new direction. Then we discover, strangely enough, that though those
messages of the afferent nerves cease to have any effect upon the
subject, the imaginings of the subject carried back along outgoing lines
produce the most unexpected results in physical states. If a postage
stamp be placed upon the hand of the hypnotized subject and he be told
that the stamp is a mustard plaster, the stamp reddens the skin and
presently raises a blister. In other words, heightened and intensified
expectant attention is able to produce the same results as an irritating
agency.[14]

[Footnote 14: Experiments by Krafft-Ebing and Forel. To be taken with
caution. See Jacoby, "Suggestion and Psycho-Therapy," p. 153.]

_Changed Attention Affects Physical States_

We are concerned here chiefly with the fact and it is a fact capable of
far-reaching application. Of course the nature and extent of the changes
thus produced are the battlegrounds of the two schools. Medical Science
is quite willing to admit that while functional action may thus be
modified no real organic changes can be produced. There is a border-land
so much still in shadow that no final word can be said about the whole
matter, but it is incontestably true that modifications of attention
have a reflex in the modification of physical states.

A pain which is not registered does not, for the time being at least,
exist, and if the attention can either through hypnotism or by a
persistent mental discipline be withdrawn from disturbing physical
reports, then the conditions which produce them will at least be left to
correct themselves without interference from consciousness and since the
whole tendency of disturbed physical organism is to correct itself, the
whole process probably goes on more quickly as it certainly goes on with
less discomfort if attention is withdrawn.[15] The assumption of health
is a tremendous health-giving force and if the condition to be remedied
is reall