By this I mean that there are occasional indications that some memory of the pain, say, of an operation has persisted in some stratum of the personality;--thus apparently indicating that there was somewhere an actual consciousness of the pain when the operation was performed.[73] We find accounts of the revival of pain in dreams after operations performed under chloroform.[74] (3) Such experiences, if more frequent, might tempt us to suppose that the pain is not wholly abrogated, but merely translated to some stratum of consciousness whose experiences do not enter into our habitual chain of memories. Yet we possess (strangely enough) what seems direct evidence that the profoundest organic substratum of our being is by suggestion wholly freed from pain. It had long been observed that recoveries from operations performed in hypnotic trance were unusually benign;--there being less tendency to inflammation than when the patient had felt the knife. The same observation--perhaps in a less marked degree--has since been made as to operations under chemical anæsthesia. The shock to the system, and the irritation to the special parts affected, are greatly diminished by chloroform. And more recently Professor Delbœuf, by an experiment of great delicacy on two symmetrical wounds, of which one was rendered painless by suggestion, has distinctly demonstrated that pain tends to induce and keep up inflammation.[75] Thus it seems that pain is abrogated at once on the highest and on the lowest level of consciousness; yet possibly in some cases (though not usually[76]) persists obscurely in some stratum of our personality into which we gain only occasional and indirect glimpses. And if indeed this be so, it need in no way surprise us. We need to remember at every point that we have no reason whatever to suppose that we are cognisant of all the trains of consciousness, or chains of memory, which are weaving themselves within us. I shall never attain on earth--perhaps I never shall in any world attain--to any complete conspectus of the variously interwoven streams of vitality which are, in fact, obscurely present in my conception of myself. It is to hypnotism in the first place that we may look for an increased power of analysis of these intercurrent streams, these irregularly super-posed strata of our psychical being. In the meantime, this power of _inhibiting_ almost any fraction of our habitual consciousness at pleasure gives for the first time to the ordinary man--if only he be a suggestible subject--a power of concentration, of _choice_ in the exercise of faculty, such as up till now only the most powerful spirits--a Newton or an Archimedes--have been able to exert.