that under ordinary circumstances would require an operation, the dreadful image of the surgeon's knife no longer appals the patient's mind. The invalid discovers that he does not die, that he sleeps a little better; certainly he is not aroused to take medicine, and there is no fear that he will take cold; he feels decidedly better at the next visit, and now faith is not only born but turned into sight. His friends assure him that he is better, and he tells them that he is so.
Perhaps the most potent cause in awakening faith is the sublime audacity displayed by the practitioner who dares to dispense with drugs, manipulation, hygiene, prayer, and religious ceremony. That spectacle would infallibly produce either such opposition and contempt as would result in the termination of the experiment, or faith. It is impossible to be in a negative position in its presence, where the responsibilities of life and death are assumed.
As for "absent treatments," these are based on the theory that to think of another entirely and abstractedly occasions a spiritual presence of that other. "Distance is annihilated, and his living image and inner personality seem to stand before us, and what we say to it we say to him."
These persons catch up and incorporate with their theories the yet immature investigations of the Society for Psychical Research, in which it is claimed that a sensitive subject can form in the mind a distinct mental picture or idea of words and letters which had been in the mind of an agent. Healers endeavor to extend those phenomena so as to make them annihilate space; and, according to them, "it is as easy to affect a person in the interior of Africa by a mental influence, as in the same room." Here they affiliate with the whole mass of superstitions
