The stimulants and narcotics, to which our review next leads us, form a standing menace to human virtue. By some strange accident of our development, the impulse of our organisms towards certain drugs--alcohol, opium, and the like--is strong enough to overpower, in a large proportion of mankind, not only the late-acquired altruistic impulses, but even the primary impulses of self-regard and self-preservation. We are brought back, one may almost say, to the "chimiotaxy" of the lowest organisms, which arrange themselves inevitably in specific relation to oxygen, malic acid, or whatever the stimulus may be. We thus experience in ourselves a strange conflict between moral responsibility and molecular affinities;--the central will overborne by dumb unnumbered elements of our being. With this condition of things hypnotic suggestion deals often in a curious way. The suggestion is not generally felt as a strengthening of the central will. It resembles rather a molecular redisposition; it leaves the patient indifferent to the stimulus, or even disgusted with it. The man for whom alcohol has combined the extremes of delight and terror now lives as though in a world in which alcohol did not exist at all.[68] Even for the slave of morphia the same sudden freedom is sometimes achieved. It has been said of victims to morphia-injection that a cure means death;--so often has suicide followed on the distress caused by giving up the drug. But in certain cases cured by suggestion it seems that no craving whatsoever has persisted after the sudden disuse of the drug. There is something here which is in one sense profounder than moral reform. There is something which suggests a spirit within us less injured than we might have feared by the body's degradation. The morphinomaniac _character_--the lowest type of subjection to a ruling vice--disappears from the personality in proportion as the drug is eliminated from the system. The shrinking outcast turns at once into the respectable man.[69] But apart from troubles consequent on any intelligible instinct, any discoverable stimulus of pleasure, there are a multitude of impulses, fears, imaginations, one or more of which may take possession of persons not otherwise apparently unhealthy or hysterical, sometimes to an extent so distressing as to impel to suicide. Some of these "phobies" have been often described of late years,--as, for instance, _agoraphobia_, which makes a man dread to cross an open space; and its converse _claustrophobia_, which makes him shrink from sitting in a room with closed doors; or the still more distressing _mysophobia_, which makes him constantly uneasy lest he should have become dirty or defiled.