into a Saviour; very readily (as is well known to be the case with many nuns) the Saviour becomes the lover. All the great women visionaries known to history were hysterical; the most famous, Santa Teresa, was not misnamed "the patron saint of hysteria." At any rate, if woman's religiousness were genuine, and if it proceeded from her own nature, she would have done something great in the religious world; but she never has done anything of any importance. I should like to put shortly what I take to be the difference between the masculine and feminine creeds; man's religion consists in a supreme belief in himself, woman's in a supreme belief in other people.
There is left to consider the self-respect which is often described as being so highly developed in the hysterical. That it is only man's self-respect which has been so thoroughly forced into woman, is clear from its nature and the way it shows itself, as Vogt, who extended and verified experiments first made by Freud, discovered from self-respect under hypnotism. The extraneous masculine will creates by its influence a "self-respecting" subject in the hypnotised woman by inducing a limitation of the field of the unhypnotised state. Apart from suggestion, in the ordinary life of the hysterical it is only the man with whom they are "impregnated" who is respected in them. Any knowledge of human nature which women have comes from their absorption of the right sort of man. In the paroxysms of hysteria this artificial self-respect disappears with the revolt of oppressed nature.
This is quite parallel to the clairvoyance of hysterical mediums, which is undoubted, but has as little to do with "occult" spiritism as the ordinary hypnotic phenomena. Just as Vogt's patients made strenuous efforts to observe themselves carefully under the powerful will of the suggestor, the clairvoyante, under the influence of the dominating voice of the man who is imposing his will on her, is capable of telepathic performances, and at his command can, blindfolded, read communications held by people unknown to her at a great distance away;
