I may remark here (following Gurney and Bramwell) how misleading a term is _mono-ideism_ for almost any hypnotic state. There is a _selection_ of ideas to which the hypnotic subject will attend, and there is a _concentration_ upon the idea thus selected; but those ideas themselves may be both complex and constantly shifting, and indeed this is just one of the ways in which the hypnotic trance differs from the somnambulic--in which it may happen that only a relatively small group of brain-centres are awake enough to act. The somnambulic servant-girl, for instance, may persist in laying the tea-table, whatever you say to her, and this may fairly be called mono-ideism; but the hypnotic subject (as Bramwell has justly insisted) can be made to obey simultaneously a greater number of separate commands than he could possibly attend to in waking life. From these inhibitions of memory,--of attention as directed to the experiences of the past,--we pass on to attention as directed to the experiences of the present. And here we are reaching a central point; we are affecting the _macula lutea_ (as it has been well called) of the mental field. Many of the most important of hypnotic results will be best described as modifications of _attention_. Any modification of attention is of course likely to be at once a check and a stimulus;--a check to certain thoughts and emotions, a stimulus to others. And in many cases it will be the _dynamogenic_ aspect of the change--the new vigour supplied in needed directions--which will be for us of greatest interest. Yet from the _inhibitive_ side also we have already had important achievements to record. All these arrests and destructions of _idées fixes_, of which so much has been said, were powerful modifications of attention, although the limited field which they covered made it simpler to introduce them under a separate heading.