"Yes, tell me, so I can be thinking it over."
Morton pondered a moment, then said: "I had a consultation to-day with a great nerve specialist, a man who uses hypnotism, or 'suggestion,' as he calls it, in his practice. He is perfectly sure that your daughter can be restored to mental health, but she must have a complete change of companionship and environment. He agrees with me that she must be separated not merely from Pratt and Clarke, but from her mother also. I need your help in this."
"That will be hard on Julia," Lambert slowly responded. "She hasn't much else but the girl and her religion." He looked down at the floor. "Yes, that is a rough sentence, professor, but I shouldn't wonder if you were right."
"It must be done, Lambert; and the very best service you can render is to take your wife and go home, leaving Viola here in our care--But that can wait till after you are rested." And with this final word he closed the door and returned to his library to await Kate's return and her inevitable demand for the story of what had taken place.
He took up one of the most recent books treating of Suggestion, and resumed consideration of a paragraph which had arrested him as if a hand had been placed upon his shoulder. "Suggestion does not limit or depress the subconscious self, it sets it free, exalts its powers, making it not something less, but something vastly more than the normal and the conscious self."
Could it be possible that Viola, in common with hundreds of other apparently well-authenticated cases, possessed the "psychic force" which Maxwell, Richet, and Lombroso recognized? The hypothesis, difficult as it was, profoundly inexplicable from every point of view, was, after all, less of a wrench to the reason, came closer to the frame of his philosophy than the claims of Crookes and Wallace. To accept the spiritist faith even as a "working hypothesis" was impossible to his definite type of mind.
If these raps, movements, voices, could be related to the working of the subconscious mind, or, as Meyers called it, the "subliminal self," then the power of the hypnotist might be able to control their order and to a certain extent their character. They were not signs of a diseased brain (according to Meyers again), but were the manifestations of a power scattered here and there among men, without system, without known law. Maxwell agreeing with this, ends by saying: "These mysterious phenomena are due, therefore, neither to spirits nor disease, but to a perfectly natural force lying within the minds of the sitters and exercised by the psychic."