The tendency now is to give suggestions without attempting to induce actual trance. It is found with many patients that if they will make their minds passive and receptive, listening to the doctor's suggestions in an absent-minded sort of way, those suggestions--that the health shall improve and the specified symptoms disappear--are carried out. The explanation of this is "wrapped in mystery". No one knows exactly how it comes about. But it seems to be somewhat thus: The complicated happenings within our bodies, such as the chemical phenomena known as digestion and the physical phenomena such as blood circulation and contraction of involuntary muscles, seem to imply intelligence, though that intelligence is not part of the conscious mind, for we do not consciously direct the processes. They go on all the same--for example--when we are asleep. Presumably, then, there is a mental Something in us, which never sleeps, and which runs the organic machinery. If we could get at this Something, and give it instructions, a part of the machinery which is working wrongly might get attended to and put right. Unfortunately, the ordinary consciousness is in the way. We cannot get at the mechanic in the mill, because we have to go through the office, and the managing director keeps us talking. Well, in hypnotic trance, or even in the preoccupied "absent-minded" state, we get past the managing director--who is asleep or attending to something else--into the mill. We get at the man who really attends to the machinery. We get past the normal consciousness, and can give our orders to the "subconscious" or "subliminal"--which means "below the threshold". In Myers' phrase, suggestion is a "successful appeal to the subliminal self", but exactly how it comes about, and why the patient usually cannot do it for himself but has to have the suggestion administered by a doctor, we do not know. Of course the word "suggestion" does not really explain anything. It is a word employed to cover our ignorance. Suggestive methods are as empirical as Mesmer's. In each case a successful appeal is made to the recuperative forces of nature, _vis medicatrix naturæ_; but exactly how or why suggestion does it, we know no more--or hardly any more--than we know how and why Mesmer's _baquet_ did it. The fact remains, however, that the thing is done. What we lack is only a satisfactory theory. At one time it was thought that only functional disorders could be relieved. But it is now recognised that the line between functional and organic is an arbitrary one. If we cannot find definite organic change in tissue, we call the ailment functional; but nevertheless some change there must be, though microscopic or unreachable. Consequently even functional disorders are at bottom organic; and, though of course grave lesions produce the gravest disorders, there is no _à priori_ impossibility in a hypnotic cure of even the most radical tissue-degeneration.