I have, I trust, thus far in a few words explained to the reader the rationale of a system of mental discipline based on the will, and how by a very easy process the latter may, like Attention and Interest, be gradually awakened. As I have before declared, everyone would like to have a strong or vigorous will, and there is a library of books or sermons in some form, exhorting the weak to awaken and fortify their wills or characters, but all represent it as a hard and vigorous process, akin to "storm and stress," battle and victory, and none really tell us how to go about it. I have indeed only indicated that it is by self-suggestion that the first steps are taken. Let us now consider the early beginning of the art or science ere discussing further developments.
"Ce domaine de la Suggestion est immense. Il n'y a pas un seul fait de notre vie mentale qui ne puisse être reproduit et exageré artificiellement par ce moyen."--_Binet et Frère, Le Magnetisme Animal_.
Omitting the many vague indications in earlier writers, as well as those drawn from ancient Oriental sources, we may note that POMPONATIUS or POMPONAZZO, an Italian, born in 1462, declared in a work entitled _De naturalium effectuum admirandorum Causis seu de Incantationibus_, that to cure disease it was necessary to use a strong will, and that the patient should have a vigorous imagination and much faith in the _praê cantator_. PARACELSUS asserted the same thing in many passages directly and indirectly. He regarded medicine as magic and the physician as a wizard who should by a powerful will act on the imagination of the patient. But from some familiarity with the works of PARACELSUS--the first folio of the first full edition is before me as I write--I would say that it would be hard to declare what his marvelous mind did _not_ anticipate in whatever was allied to medicine and natural philosophy. Thus I have found that long before VAN HELMONT, who has the credit of the discovery, PARACELSUS knew how to prepare silicate of soda, or water-glass.
Hypnotism as practiced at the present day, and with regard to its common results, was familiar to JOHANN JOSEPH GASSNER, a priest in Suabia, of whom LOUIS FIGUIER writes as follows in his _Histoire du Merveilleux dans les Temps Modernes_, published in 1860: