In no direction, perhaps, do the results of suggestion appear more inexplicable than here. Nowhere have we a more conspicuous touching of a spring;--a more complete achievement, almost in a single moment, of the deliverance which years of painful effort have failed to effect.[66] These cases stand midway between ordinary therapeutics and moral suasion. No one can here doubt the importance of finding the shortest and swiftest path to cure. Nor is there any reason to think that cures thus obtained are less complete or permanent than if they had been achieved by gradual moral effort. These facts should be borne in mind throughout the whole series of the higher hypnotic effects, and should serve to dispel any anxiety as to the possible loss of moral training when cure is thus magically swift. Each of these effects consists, as we must suppose, in the modification of some group of nervous centres; and, so far as we can tell, that is just the same result which moral effort made above the conscious threshold more slowly and painfully attains. This difference, in fact, is like the difference between results achieved by diligence and results achieved by genius. Something valuable in the way of training,--some exercise in patience and resolve,--no doubt may be missed by the man who is "suggested" into sobriety;--in the same way as it was missed by the schoolboy Gauss,--writing down the answers to problems as soon as set, instead of spending on them a diligent hour. But moral progress is in its essence as limitless as mathematical; and the man who is thus carried over rudimentary struggles may still find plenty of moral effort in life to train his character and tax his resolution. Among these morbid tricks _kleptomania_ has an interest of its own, on account of the frequent doubt whether it is not put forward as a mere excuse for pilfering. It may thus happen that the cure is the best proof of the existence of the disease; and certain cures indicate that the impulse has veritably involved a morbid excitability of motor centres, acted on by special stimuli,--an _idée fixe_ with an immediate outcome in act.[67] Many words and acts of _violence_ fall under the same category, in cases where the impulse to swear or to strike has acquired the unreasoning automatic promptness of a _tic_, and yet may be at once inhibited by suggestion. Many undesirable impulses in the realm of _sex_ are also capable of being thus corrected or removed.