These _schemes of self-suggestion_, as I have termed them, constitute one of the most interesting parts of my subject, but space forbids that I should enter into a discussion of them here. It is sufficient to point out that in order to make self-suggestion operative, no strong belief or enthusiasm, such as those schemes imply, is really necessary. No recorded cases of self-suggestion, I think, are more instructive than those published by Dr. Hugh Wingfield in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v. p. 279. (The paper was printed anonymously.) Dr. Wingfield was a Demonstrator in Physiology in the University of Cambridge, and his subjects were mainly candidates for the Natural Sciences Tripos. In these cases there was no excitement of any kind, and no previous belief. The phenomena occurred incidentally during a series of experiments on other points, and were a surprise to every one concerned. The results achieved were partly automatic writing and partly phenomena of neuro-muscular excitability;--stiffening of the arms, and so forth. "It seems probable," says Dr. Wingfield, "that all phenomena capable of being produced by the suggestion of the hypnotiser can also be produced by self-suggestion in a self-suggestive subject." Experiments like these--confirming with modern care the conclusions reached by Fahnestock and others at various points in hypnotic history--seem to me to open a new inlet into human faculty, as surprising in its way as those first wild experiments of Mesmer himself. Who would have supposed that a healthy undergraduate could "by an effort of mind" throw his whole body into a state of cataleptic rigidity, so that he could rest with his heels on one chair and his head on another? or that other healthy young men could "close their own eyes so that they were unable to open them," and the like? The trivial character of these laboratory experiments makes them physiologically the more remarkable. There is the very minimum of predisposing conditions, of excited expectation, or of external motive prompting to extraordinary effort. And the results are not subjective merely--relief of pain and so on--but are definite neuro-muscular changes, capable (as in the case of the head and heels on separate chairs) of unmistakable test. Yet, important though these and similar experiments in self-suggestion may be, they do not solve our problem as to the ultimate origin and distribution of the faculty thus displayed. We know no better with self-suggestion than with suggestion from outside _why_ it is that one man succeeds where others fail, or why a man who succeeds once fails in his next attempt. Within the ordinary range of physiological explanations nothing (I repeat) has as yet been discovered which can guide us to the true nature or exciting causes of this characteristic responsiveness of hypnosis. If we are to find any light, it must be in some direction which has as yet been little explored.