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Updated: June 25, 2025
We shall find them display suggestibility and but slight capacity for reasoning, while they are open to the influence of the leaders of crowds, and they are guided in the main by unconscious sentiments. In the course of this investigation we shall have occasion to observe some interesting examples of the errors that may be made by persons not versed in the psychology of crowds.
Again a certain monotony of speaking may easily add to the increase of the suggestibility. Everyone knows that another most fruitful cause of this change is any mystic inspiration, any emotion in which the individual feels himself in contact with something higher or larger or stronger.
The uneducated will on the whole offer less resistance to suggestions, just as superstitions find the freest play in the minds of the untrained. It is not by chance that the earlier epidemics of pathological suggestibility have on the whole disappeared with the better popular education. In a similar way work fatigue and exhaustion.
The rhythmic phrases not as a rule very full of meaning or intellectual appeal exercise a slightly hypnotic effect on the analyzing surface-mind; and induce a condition of suggestibility open to all the influences of the place and of our fellow worshippers.
Fears have been expressed that, by such an application of the laws of suggestion to religious experience, we shall reduce religion itself to a mere favourable subjectivism, and identify faith with suggestibility. But here the bearing of this series of facts on bodily health provides us with a useful analogy. Bodily health is no illusion.
If this is the case, the psychologist says that the mind was in a state of increased suggestibility. The degree of suggestibility, that is of willingness to yield to such propositions for action and of inability to resist them, is indeed different from man to man.
There was in him a very creditable sense of selection, as will be seen especially in the water colours, so original with him, so gifted in their power of treatment one of the few great masters of the medium the world has known. He knew the meaning of wash as few since have known it, he knew that it has scale and limitation of its own, and for all that, infinite suggestibility.
It is not necessary at this place to emphasize the fact that our theory, if accepted, would constitute a theory and a definition also of hypnotism. Of interest to our inquiry is merely a characteristic mark of the hypnotic state, its tremendous suggestibility. Why is this? Our theory would answer that all impulses are held in equilibrium, and that an external suggestion has thus no rivals.
If we had reached the highest degree of suggestibility, as in hypnotism, we could not read “Cook with gas” without at once putting a gas stove into our kitchen. Yet even such a mild suggestion has its influence and tends slightly to weaken the arguments which would lead to an opposite action.
Its function is to increase the energy of the idea. The cool, judicious type of belief will never possess the life-changing power of a more fervid, though perhaps less rational faith. Thus the state of corporate suggestibility generated in a revival and on which the success of that revival depends, is closely related to the emotional character of the appeal which is made.
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