Let us now return to the point where I said that we can control and lead our imagination, just as a torrent or an unbroken horse can be controlled. To do so, it is enough in the first place to know that this is possible (of which fact almost everyone is ignorant) and secondly, to know by what means it can be done. Well, the means is very simple; it is that which we have used every day since we came into the world, without wishing or knowing it and absolutely unconsciously, but which unfortunately for us, we often use wrongly and to our own detriment. This means is _autosuggestion_. Whereas we constantly give ourselves unconscious autosuggestions, all we have to do is to give ourselves conscious ones, and the process consists in this: first, to weigh carefully in one's mind the things which are to be the object of the autosuggestion, and according as they require the answer "yes" or "no" to repeat several times without thinking of anything else: "This thing is coming", or "this thing is going away"; "this thing will, or will not happen, etc., etc. . . ." [*] If the unconscious accepts this suggestion and transforms it into an autosuggestion, the thing or things are realized in every particular. [*] Of course the thing must be in our power. Thus understood, _autosuggestion_ is nothing but hypnotism as I see it, and I would define it in these simple words: _The influence of the imagination upon the moral and physical being of mankind_. Now this influence is undeniable, and without returning to previous examples, I will quote a few others. If you persuade yourself that you can do a certain thing, provided this thing be _possible_, you will do it however difficult it may be. If on the contrary you _imagine_ that you cannot do the simplest thing in the world, it is impossible for you to do it, and molehills become for you unscalable mountains. Such is the case of neurasthenics, who, believing themselves incapable of the least effort, often find it impossible even to walk a few steps without being exhausted. And these same neurasthenics sink more deeply into their depression, the more efforts they make to throw it off, like the poor wretch in the quicksands who sinks in all the deeper the more he tries to struggle out. In the same way it is sufficient to think a pain is going, to feel it indeed disappear little by little, and inversely, it is enough to think that one suffers in order to feel the pain begin to come immediately. I know certain people who predict in advance that they will have a sick headache on a certain day, in certain circumstances, and on that day, in the given circumstances, sure enough, they feel it. They brought their illness on themselves, just as others cure theirs by _conscious autosuggestion_.