As a rule, men take little trouble to sort out the incoming suggestions.  They allow uncriticized beliefs and prejudices, the ideas of hatred, anxiety or ill-health, free entrance.  They fail to seize and affirm the ideas of power, renovation, joy.  They would be more careful, did they grasp more fully the immense and often enduring effect of these accepted suggestions; the extent in which the fundamental, unreasoning psychic deeps are plastic to ideas.  Yet this plasticity is exhibited in daily life first under the emotional form of sympathy, response to the suggestion of other peoples’ feeling-states; and next under the conative form of imitation, active acceptance of the suggestion made by their appearance, habits, deeds.  All political creeds, panics, fashion and good form witness to the overwhelming power of suggestion.  We are so accustomed to this psychic contagion that we fail to realize the strangeness of the process:  but it is now known to reach a degree previously unsuspected, and of which we have not yet found the limits.

In the religious sphere, the more sensational demonstrations of this psychic suggestibility have long been notorious.  Obvious instances are those ecstatics—­some of them true saints, some only religious invalids—­whose continuous and ardent meditation on the Cross produced in them the actual bodily marks of the Passion of Christ.  In less extreme types, perpetual dwelling on this subject, together with that eager emotional desire to be united with the sufferings of the Redeemer which mediaeval religion encouraged, frequently modified the whole life of the contemplative; shaping the plastic mind, and often the body too, to its own mould.  A good historic example of this law of religious suggestibility is the case of Julian of Norwich.  As a young girl, Julian prayed that she might have an illness at thirty years of age, and also a closer knowledge of Christ’s pains.  She forgot the prayer:  but it worked below the threshold as forgotten suggestions often do, and when she was thirty the illness came.  Its psychic origin can still be recognized in her own candid account of it; and with the illness the other half of that dynamic prayer received fulfilment, in those well-known visions of the Passion to which we owe the “Revelations of Divine Love."[99]

This is simply a striking instance of a process which is always taking place in every one of us, for good or evil.  The deeper mind opens to all who knock; provided only that the new-comers be not the enemies of some stronger habit or impression already within.  To suggestions which coincide with the self’s desires or established beliefs it gives an easy welcome; and these, once within, always tend to self-realization.  Thus the French Carmelite Therese de l’Enfant-Jesus, once convinced that she was destined to be a “victim of love,” began that career of suffering which ended in her death at the age of twenty-four.[100] The lives of the Saints are full of incidents explicable