Now we can show how our subconsciousism, when unaided and not encouraged (there is nearly but not quite a contradiction in terms here), has had its effect upon the player hitherto. If a man watches the play of any golfer much better than himself, say a first-class professional, very closely for some time he takes a little of that man's style into his own system without knowing it, and, it may be, without making any conscious effort to imitate it. He is much more likely to succeed in this way than by making any deliberate attempt to copy. Again, you will often find players telling you, that after a week of watching a championship meeting, and without having paid attention to any player in particular, certainly without attempting to imitate any one, they find on resuming their own game that a new influence is upon it; that in particular they address the ball in a more businesslike way, with more confidence; that their swing is less flabby, and that they play their iron shots with much greater sense of wrist, and with more firmness. This has been noticed over and over again, and it is a most interesting result of the influence of impressions involuntarily recorded on the mind. Consider another way in which the impression acts. A player may be removed from the game through illness or some other reason for a time, and during that period he works some of the problems of golf out in his mind, and constantly pictures a new and particular way of playing a stroke that has troubled him. When he returns to the links he plays the stroke like that without any effort to do so, or perhaps without even thinking of it. Another remarkable example of subconsciousism was afforded to me recently by a good golfer, who said that to develop a certain stroke which he had found beyond his best efforts - conscious efforts - he had three enlarged photographs made of that stroke as executed properly by a first-class man, one showing the beginning, the other the top of the swing, and the third the finish. He had these pictures placed alongside each other on one of the walls of his room, and there they were all the time, not to be avoided. He made no effort to study them, but his mind simply absorbed them, and then subconsciously he found the stroke coming to him until in the end he played it just like that. In these matters subconsciousism is shown to be at work without being understood or at all suspected.

Having this valuable agency at command the next thing is to apply it, and make it of more thorough practical effect without permitting it to change to interfering and dangerous consciousness. In the cases that have already been cited certain methods are plainly suggested. Here is another which has, as I know, proved amazingly effective at times. The player, we may say, is not driving as well as he should, or in the way he would like to do. At the moment of taking his place on the teeing-ground he runs through his mind, as it were, a cinematographic picture of his favourite model player doing the drive. He sees, in imagination, the man taking his stance, swinging the club back, down on to the ball again, and finishing. He just sees it once, and bothers about it no more. Then he sets about his own drive without any further reference to the mental picture that his mind has absorbed. The mind does the rest. The drive may not be made in the ideal way that was imagined. It may be done in the old way. It may even be foozled. But there has been an influence at work, and if that influence is always employed in the same way the good result will come in time, always provided - and this is important - that the model is one that is suitable to the player, and can be copied by him. It would be useless for a man who is far past forty, very fat and very short, with no athletic quality in him at all, to take Harry Vardon and his graceful lithesome swing for his mental cinema show.

Another way in which practical subconsciousism may be made exceedingly valuable is by imagining a place to which the ball has to be delivered without looking at it when it ought not to be looked at, as when a very short running or pitching approach has to be made. The very best of men often find it impossible to keep the eye fixed on the ball until the stroke is done. A little while since there was the case of one of the finest amateur golfers of the time flopping his ball into the bunker guarding the green of the first hole at Sandwich from the bank thereof, when, if he had played an easy shot and kept his eye at rest, he would almost certainly have avoided this trouble, and then won the St. George's Cup for which he was playing. I remember an exactly similar case in the final of the Amateur Championship of 1908, at Sandwich, when Mr. Lassen, who did win, knocked his ball into the big bunker in front of the old tenth green there from the top of the cliff overlooking it. What is needed in such cases, or in like cases when presented to inferior players, is something to keep the mind's eye contented, and it has been found to serve if a picture of the hole is flashed into the mind just before the stroke is made. This is what is certainly done, though unintentionally, when putting. The man does keep his eye on the ball when making his stroke this time; but yet it is most desirable that his mind should retain a very clear and exact impression of the place where the hole is, the distance of it, and the features of the green in between. In other games that may be compared with golf, the player has his eye on the object at the moment of striking; in billiards the very last glance is given at the object ball, and the eye is on it at the moment the stroke is made. That is because the player is sure of his way of striking, as in putting he is not. If you try a method of putting which was once attempted by some players, but was severely and properly discountenanced by the authorities, of lying down on the green and putting with the end of the club, billiard fashion, you will find that then the eye is on the hole when the stroke is made. In golf, the player's eye being wanted for the ball, a last look is given at the hole, and the picture of it is kept on the mind when the stroke is being made, and it influences the application of strength more than the player often realises.