From these general facts we rightly judge that, in our normal life, attention is freely directed. Whatever overcomes this free balance of power impairs our self-consciousness, and widens avenues of approach in which dynamic instead of genuinely rational influences become regnant. Insurrection takes the place of unitary government; passion dethrones judgment. We should bear in mind, however, that this insurrection of the sub-conscious is thoroughly organized. There is, moreover, on account of the withdrawal of the efficiency (the soporific condition) of the upper centers of the brain, an abnormal concentration in the lower centers. Ideo-motor action may now be developed without the wonted restraints of deliberation. Instead of checking money out of the bank in the regular way the thief gains access to the safe. The self-moving energies which result from habituation are stored in the sub-conscious, and become available. The imitative instinct operates without restraint. Under the law of adaptation what is heard is believed - what is commanded becomes Ideo-motor. Similarly what is seen (an act of a personality) is executed.

The hypnotic subject may be more or less conscious that he is performing, still he is unable to arouse his voluntary attention sufficiently to break with environing conditions. A command to immoral action may perhaps awaken, and cause a refusal. The extent to which the delusion, the control, may be carried may depend also upon physiological rather than psychological peculiarities of the individual. The same may be said of cataleptic effects produced in the muscular system. At the sarnie time the power of the fancy or imagination, where the subjective replaces the objective, may be such as to checkmate the senses and produce radical modifications of the physique.

As the stores of the memory are sub-consciously adjusted the development of memorial images may be greater than is possible under the rule of the voluntary; effects may be produced which will assert themselves in the future. Ordinarily, however, when the memory, which has thus like a stream overflowed its banks, returns to its proper channel, there is no recollection of the fields that were flooded during the supremacy of the sub-conscious self.

Indeed, while we may scientifically differentiate the sub-conscious self from the normal conscious self, recognizing a double consciousness, there is no definite sub-conscious personality, the recognition of the self in hypnosis depending quite indefinitely upon the centralization of the moment.