Some who did not want to be disturbed in their enjoyment of things external, pettishly said: “All you tell may be true, but one world at a time is my motto.” Yet any one who said that a child should be left uninstructed and unprepared for the grown-up life ahead of him would, very appropriately, be called a fool.
Cartice learned what all prophets and teachers have learned to their cost—that the world is in bondage to its own ignorance, because it refuses to be liberated. The minds of men are in thrall to a law we have but recently named—the law of hypnotism, which is at once both the agent of darkness and of light.
Everybody lives continually under hypnotic influence, otherwise the power of suggestion. What we call public opinion is thought that has massed itself into a barrier so formidable that only spirits the most heroic and dauntless dare assail it. The many are fused together as one and become a gigantic hypnotizer of men.
It has been demonstrated a million times that if there is anything a man cannot do it is to stand out against the united thought of his fellow men. Human beings, for the most part, are in slavery to whatever thought has formed their environment, “as neat prisoners as ever slept in jails.” In other words they are hypnotized and refuse to be aroused from their hypnotic sleep.
All who allow others to do their thinking live and die in a hypnotic trance. The thought that is steadily thrown upon the minds of children year after year usually hypnotizes them for life. This is proven in their religious leanings. The majority follow the lead of their parents and it is the same in politics. The boy is a democrat or republican, because his father was. We call it the force of early education, but we might as well say early hypnotism.
The press is the greatest of hypnotic operators. It makes public opinion through the hypnotic principle. Its daily reiteration puts the minds of impressionable readers into as profound a hypnotic trance as any professional operator ever achieves. Every orator who sways his audience does so by means of the hypnotic law, and every writer who thrills his readers sets the same law in motion. In it lies the power of all government, from the primitive paternal to the broadest Republic the earth has yet produced—the will of the passably intelligent few is imposed upon the less intelligent many.
Even the most potent force known—the attraction that draws the sexes together, operates largely through hypnotism, or suggestion. Do we not become like that we hear and see and live among? Are we not the product of whatever thought we have absorbed during our life? In short, we are that thought embodied, neither more nor less. Steady suggestion makes public opinion, that terrible, formidable, irresistible wall against which new thought must beat and hack and storm for centuries sometimes before an incision can be made in it.
We are all more or less in an hypnotic sleep. Certain intellectual hair-splitters deprecate the use of the word, hypnotism, when employed to describe a condition of mind that is not sleep, as we commonly use that term. Yet we may be awake to certain facts and asleep to others. When one cannot see a truth for a time and then recognizes it, we say he awakens to it. Was he not asleep as far as it was concerned before?
The hypnotic principle is as old as the human race. Yea, the hills are young beside it. By means of it we have become what we are, and because of it our progress has been slow, for the hypnotized subject holds to his illusions with a tenacity that throws barnacles into the shade. We were hypnotized into the old thought that enslaves us, and must be hypnotized out of it into that which shall set us free.
This law is operative far beyond our range of knowledge. It links this world or this state of being, rather, to the one that follows it.