whether or not an irreparable organic disease has attacked the body, but if he does not find such organic destruction, then the patient is to be handed over to the minister, who will take care that through his religious belief and inspiration the mind will triumph over the weakness of the body. Whoever looks in this way over the history of mankind can no longer doubt that belief in supernatural powers is really an agency for the overcoming of disease. We may be interested in it from the standpoint of religion or from the standpoint of psychology or from the standpoint of ethnology. In every case we have to acknowledge that he who believes may be cured. If we abstract first from the religious point of view and consider the problem as a scientific one, we have to interpret all those curative effects of belief as results of suggestion. The attitude of the one who gives the suggestion has gone in the history of mankind through all possible variations. He may have been filled with fervent belief, rejecting any interpretation except the religious one, or he may have produced the suggestion of belief almost with the intentions of a physician who simply relies on the physiological effects of any suggestion; and between these two extremes any number of steps is possible. Moreover the suggestion may have been detached from any personality and may have belonged to any symbol of religious energies, like the relics of the Catholic Church. Even the most skeptical of ethnologists ought to acknowledge that very little in this history of religious psychotherapy points to a conscious fraud. Those shamans of the savages from Siberia to South Africa, from Australia to Mexico, are in ecstasies which make them really believe in the mysterious power of their manipulations. The ethnologist finds indeed as most common characteristics of all those primitive movements that those who cure are chosen from among neurotics who by epileptic attacks or hallucinations and obsessions are predisposed to feel themselves as bearers of a higher mission.