perhaps as it seems holy or edifying vagrancy of thought.  In the second, by a deliberate choice and act of will, foreconscious thinking is set going and directed towards an assigned end:  the apprehending and actualizing of our deepest intuition of God.  In it, a great region of the mind usually ignored by us and left to chance, yet source of many choices and deeds, and capable of much purifying pain, is put to its true work:  and it is work which must be humbly, regularly and faithfully performed.  It is to this region that poetry, art and music—­and even, if I dare say so, philosophy—­make their fundamental appeal.  No life is whole and harmonized in which it has not taken its right place.

We must now go on—­and indeed, any psychological study of prayerful experience must lead us on—­to the subject of suggestion, and its relation to the inner life.  By suggestion of course is here meant, in conformity with current psychological doctrine, the process by which an idea enters the deeper and unconscious psychic levels and there becomes fruitful.  Its real nature, and in consequence something of its far-reaching importance, is now beginning to be understood by us:  a fact of great moment for both the study and the practice of the spiritual life.  Since the transforming work of the Spirit must be done through man’s ordinary psychic machinery and in conformity with the laws which govern it, every such increase in our knowledge of that machinery must serve the interests of religion, and show its teachers the way to success.  Suggestion is usually said to be of two kinds.  The first is hetero-suggestion, in which the self-realizing idea is received either wittingly or unwittingly from the outer world.  During the whole of our conscious lives for good or evil we are at the mercy of such hetero-suggestions, which are being made to us at every moment by our environment; and they form, as we shall afterwards see, a dominant factor in corporate religious exercises.  The second type is auto-suggestion.  In this, by means of the conscious mind, an idea is implanted in the unconscious and there left to mature.  Thus do willingly accepted beliefs, religious, social, or scientific, gradually and silently permeate the whole being and show their results in character.

A little reflection shows, however, that these two forms of suggestion shade into one another; and that no hetero-suggestion, however impressively given, becomes active in us until we have in some sort accepted it and transformed it into an auto-suggestion.  Theology expresses this fact in its own special language, when it says that the will must co-operate with grace if it is to be efficacious.  Thus the primacy of the will is safe-guarded.  It stands, or should stand, at the door; selecting from among the countless dynamic suggestions, good and bad, which life pours in on us, those which serve the best interests of the self.