This explains the baffling experience of the drug-taker, the drunkard, the victim of some vicious craving. His mind is obsessed by the desire for satisfaction. The efforts of the will to restrain it only make it more overmastering. Repeated failures convince him at length that he is powerless to control himself, and this idea, operating as an autosuggestion, increases his impotence. So in despair, he abandons himself to his obsession, and his life ends in wreckage. We can now see, not only that the Will is incapable of vanquishing a thought, but that as fast as the Will brings up its big guns, Thought captures them and turns them against it. This truth, which Baudouin calls the Law of Reversed Effort, is thus stated by Coue: "_When the Imagination and the Will are in conflict the Imagination invariably gains the day._" "_In the conflict between the Will and the Imagination, the force of the Imagination is in direct ratio to the square of the Will._" The mathematical terms are used, of course, only metaphorically. Thus the Will turns out to be, not the commanding monarch of life, as many people would have it, but a blind Samson, capable either of turning the mill or of pulling down the pillars. Autosuggestion succeeds by avoiding conflict. It replaces wrong thought by right, literally applying in the sphere of science the principle enunciated in the New Testament: "Resist not evil, but overcome evil with good." This doctrine is in no sense a negation of the will. It simply puts it in its right place, subordinates it to a higher power. A moment's reflection will suffice to show that the will cannot be more than the servant of thought. We are incapable of exercising the will unless the imagination has first furnished it with a goal. We cannot simply will, we must will _something_, and that something exists in our minds as an idea. The will acts rightly when it is in harmony with the idea in the mind. But what happens when, in the smooth execution of our idea, we are confronted with an obstacle? This obstacle may exist outside us, as did the golfer's bunker, but it must also exist as an idea in our minds or we should not be aware of it. As long as we allow this mental image to stay there, the efforts of our will to overcome it only make it more irresistible. We run our heads against it like a goat butting a brick wall. Indeed, in this way we can magnify the smallest difficulty until it becomes insurmountable--we can make mole-hills into mountains. This is precisely what the neurasthenic does. The idea of a difficulty dwells unchanged in his mind, and all his efforts to overcome it only increase its dimensions, until it overpowers him and he faints in the effort to cross a street.