SUGGESTION EXPEDIENTS. 215 anxiety, the hanging of beautiful pictures and cheerful mottoes, the reading of selected stories and humorous bits, together with the thousandand-one things which will occur to the mind of one who has faith in the curative power of mental suggestion. All these are useful in their several places. "What would'st thou? All is thine, The ways are opening for thee, "At least ninety-eight per cent. of our mental life is subconscious. If you will analyze your mental operations you will find that consciousness-conscious thinking-is never a continuous line of consciousness, but a series of conscious data with great intervals of subconscious. We sit and try to solve a problem and fail. We rise and walk around, try again and fail. Suddenly an idea dawns that leads to the solution of the problem. The subconscious processes were at work. We do not volitionally create our own thinking. It takes place in us. We are more or less passive recipients. We cannot change the nature of a thought or of a truth, but we can, as it were, guide the ship by the moving of the helm. Our mentation is largely the result of the Cosmic Whole upon us. Annihilate the Cosmos and our thinking would instantly cease.' -Prof. Elmer Gates in “Mind Building." "Finally, if beneath a fanaticism and the extravagance of men blindly seeking relief from pain, some glimmering truth makes way, that truth also it must be for science to adopt and to utilize, to clarify and to interpret. By one method or other and her familiar method of widespread cautious experiment should surely be the bestscience must subject to her own deliberate purposes that intelligent vital control, that reserve of energy which lies beneath the conscious threshold and works obscurely for the evolution of man."-F. W. H. Myers. CHAPTER VII. THE PRACTICE OF PSYCHO-THERAPY-CONTINUED. SUGGESTION IN SURGERY. Suggestion finds in surgery a rich and productive field, but one wherein its value has thus far remained almost wholly unrecognized, its power but partially utilized. Surgery has wrought marvelously during the last generation. Its praises are sung on every "Great is Modern Surgery," we may well side. cry. It has done much. It is customary to ascribe the tremendous advances in this department very largely to improved technique, and rightly so, I verily believe. But they have not come alone from innovations along the line of cleanliness. The process has been complex and, in a measure, inexplicable. I know a surgeon who gives little heed to the modern methods of sterilization, who in his precautions is but slightly in advance of the operator of three decades ago, but whose results, while not so free from suppuration, discomforts and deaths as those of the more scrupulous surgeon, are far better than those following in the wake of old-time surgery. Suggestion a Factor in Surgical Advances. Now, why is this so? It does not prove that modern precautions are |