However inadequately, the attempt has nevertheless been made in these pages to present a wider and, at the same time, a more precise definition of those psychic and vital forces, included in the term environment, which play so great a part in the formation and growth of human beliefs, opinions and sentiments, in binding together nations, communities and groups, and no less a part in setting them against one another. For lack of a better, the designation "cosmic suggestion" has been used as a generic term to describe the force resulting from the accumulative suggestions or impulsions of aggregations of individual agents, between whom and the subjects or recipients a state of _rapport_ is more or less established. It is an aspect, or perhaps more accurately a product, of the vital energy of the cosmos. In a community or a mass of men moved by common emotions and ideas, each individual plays the double rôle of operator and affected object or recipient. The communication of a proposition by suggestion is distinguished from, though often accompanied by, other means by which ideas are communicated through the senses, involving rational processes which produce conviction. Emotional suggestions are either rejected or accepted unquestioningly in the absence of any logical reason. The supreme importance and general applicability in normal waking life of this wider aspect of hypnotic suggestion is seldom adequately appreciated by students of social development. That the faiths and convictions of men do not depend upon their appeal to "man's reasoning faculties" is, however, usually admitted. Lecky frequently dwells on this fact, as in the following passage: "In most men the love of truth is so languid, and their reluctance to encounter mental prejudices is so great, that they yield their judgments without an effort to the current, withdraw their minds from all opinions or arguments opposed to their own, and thus speedily convince themselves of the truth of what they wish to believe."