They would be more careful, did they grasp more fully the immense and often enduring effect of these accepted suggestions; the extent in which the fundamental, unreasoning psychic deeps are plastic to ideas.

Yet this plasticity is exhibited in daily life first under the emotional form of sympathy, response to the suggestion of other peoples' feeling-states; and next under the conative form of imitation, active acceptance of the suggestion made by their appearance, habits, deeds.

All political creeds, panics, fashion and good form witness to the overwhelming power of suggestion.

We are so accustomed to this psychic contagion that we fail to realize the strangeness of the process: but it is now known to reach a degree previously unsuspected, and of which we have not yet found the limits.
In the religious sphere, the more sensational demonstrations of this psychic suggestibility have long been notorious.

Obvious instances are those ecstatics--some of them true saints, some only religious invalids--whose continuous and ardent meditation on the Cross produced in them the actual bodily marks of the Passion of Christ.