The individual may return upon, revise, restate, enlarge, and analyze the facts out of which suggestion springs. Inductive methods, in the technical sense, all have to do with regulating the conditions under which observation, memory, and the acceptance of the testimony of others (the operations supplying the raw data) proceed.
Method of indirect regulation Given the facts A B C D on one side and certain individual habits on the other, suggestion occurs automatically. But if the facts A B C D are carefully looked into and thereby resolved into the facts A´ B´´ R S, a suggestion will automatically present itself different from that called up by the facts in their first form. To inventory the facts, to describe exactly and minutely their respective traits, to magnify artificially those that are obscure and feeble, to reduce artificially those that are so conspicuous and glaring as to be distracting,—these are ways of modifying the facts that exercise suggestive force, and thereby indirectly guiding the formation of suggested inferences.
Illustration from diagnosis Consider, for example, how a physician makes his diagnosis—his inductive interpretation. If he is scientifically trained, he suspends—postpones—reaching a conclusion in order that he may not be led by superficial occurrences into a snap judgment. Certain conspicuous phenomena may forcibly suggest typhoid, but he avoids a conclusion, or even any strong preference for this or that conclusion until he has greatly (i) enlarged the scope of his data, and (ii) rendered them more minute. He not only questions the patient as to his feelings and as to his acts prior to the disease, but by various manipulations with his hands (and with instruments made for the purpose) brings to light a large number of facts of which the patient is quite unaware. The state of tem-
