Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death Part 13

e??et? ? ??d??, t? t' ??d??? data ?e??e?, ?? ????e?, t??? d' a?te ?? ?p???ta? ??e???.

--HOMER.

In the last chapter we were led on to adopt a conception of sleep which, whether or not it prove ultimately in any form acceptable by science, is at any rate in deep congruity with the evidence brought forward in this work. Our human life, in this view, exists and energises, at the present moment, both in the material and in the spiritual world. Human personality, as it has developed from lowly ancestors, has become differentiated into two phases; one of them mainly adapted to material or planetary, the other to spiritual or cosmic operation. The subliminal self, mainly directing the sleeping phase, is able either to rejuvenate the organism by energy drawn in from the spiritual world;--or, on the other hand, temporarily and partially to relax its connection with that organism, in order to expatiate in the exercise of supernormal powers;--telepathy, telesthaesia, ecstasy.

Such were the suggestions of the evidence as to dream and vision; such, I may add, will be seen to be the suggestions of _spontaneous somnambulism_, which has not yet fallen under our discussion. Yet claims so large as these demand corroboration from observation and experiment along many different lines of approach. Some such corroboration we have, in antic.i.p.atory fashion, already acquired. Discussing in Chapter II. the various forms of disintegration of personality, we had frequent glimpses of beneficent subliminal powers. We saw the deepest stratum of the self intervening from time to time with a therapeutic object, or we caught it in the act of exercising, even if aimlessly or sporadically, some faculty beyond supraliminal reach. And we observed, moreover, that the agency by which these subliminal powers were invoked was generally the _hypnotic trance_. Of the nature of that trance I then said nothing; it was manifest only that here was some kind of induced or artificial somnambulism, which seemed to systematise that beneficial control of the organism which spontaneous sleep-waking states had exercised in a fitful way. It must plainly be our business to understand _ab initio_ these hypnotic phenomena; to push as far as may be what seems like an experimental evolution of the sleeping phase of personality.

Let us suppose, then, that we are standing at our present point, but with no more knowledge of hypnotic phenomena than existed in the boyhood of Mesmer. We shall know well enough what, as experimental psychologists, we desire to do; but we shall have little notion of how to set about it. We desire to summon at our will, and to subdue to our use, these rarely emergent sleep-waking faculties. On their physical side, we desire to develop their inhibition of pain and their reinforcement of energy; on their intellectual side, their concentration of attention; on their emotional side, their sense of freedom, expansion, joy. Above all, we desire to get hold of those supernormal faculties--telepathy and telaesthesia--of which we have caught fitful glimpses in somnambulism and in dream.

Yet to such hopes as these the so-called "experience of ages" (generally a very short and sc.r.a.ppy induction!) will seem altogether to refuse any practical outcome. History, indeed,--with the wonted vagueness of history,--will offer us a long series of stories of the strange sanative suggestion or influence of man on man;--beginning, say, with David and Saul, or with David and Abis.h.a.g, and ending with Valentine Greatrakes,--or with the Stuarts' last touch for the King's evil. But in knowledge of how actually to set about it, we should still be just on the level of the Seven Sages.[56]

And now let the reader note this lesson on the unexhausted possibilities of human organisms and human life. Let him take his stand at one of the modern centres of hypnotic practice,--in Professor Bernheim's hospital-ward, or Dr. van Renterghem's _clinique_; let him see the hundreds of patients thrown daily into hypnotic trance, in a few moments, and as a matter of course; and let him then remember that this process, which now seems as obvious and easy as giving a pill, was absolutely unknown not only to Galen and to Celsus, but to Hunter and to Harvey; and when at last discovered was commonly denounced as a fraudulent fiction, almost up to the present day. Nay, if one chances to have watched as a boy some cure effected in Dr. Elliotson's Mesmeric Hospital, before neglect and calumny had closed that too early effort for human good;--if one has seen popular indifference and professional prejudice check the new healing art for a generation;--is not one likely to have imbibed a deep distrust of all _a priori_ negations in the matter of human faculty;--of all _obiter dicta_ of eminent men on subjects with which they do not happen to be acquainted? Would not one, after such an experience, rather choose (with Darwin) "the fool's experiment" than any immemorial ignorance which has stiffened into an unreasoning incredulity?

Mesmer's experiment was almost a "fool's experiment," and Mesmer himself was almost a charlatan. Yet Mesmer and his successors,--working from many different points of view, and following many divergent theories,--have opened an ever-widening way, and have brought us now to a position where we can fairly hope, by experiments made no longer at random, to reproduce and systematise most of those phenomena of spontaneous somnambulism which once seemed to lie so tantalisingly beyond our grasp.

That promise is great indeed; yet it is well to begin by considering precisely how far it extends. We must not suppose that we shall at once be subduing to our experiment a central, integrated, reasonable Self.

We must be content (at first at any rate) if we can affect the personality in the same limited way as hysteria and somnambulism have affected it; but yet can act deliberately and usefully where these have acted hurtfully and at random. It is enough to hope that we may inhibit pain, as it is inhibited for the hysteric; or concentrate attention, as it is concentrated for the somnambulist; or change the tastes and pa.s.sions, as these are changed in alternating personalities; or (best of all) recover and fix something of that supernormal faculty of which we have caught fugitive glimpses in vision and dream. Our proof of the origination of any phenomenon in the deeper strata of our being must lie in the intrinsic nature of the faculty exhibited;--not in the wisdom of its actual direction. _That_ must often depend on the order given from above the threshold; just as the magic mill of the fable continues magical, although, for lack of the proper formula to stop it, it be still grinding out superfluous salt at the bottom of the sea.

This brief introduction will, I hope, show that hypnotism is no disconnected or extraneous insertion into experimental psychology, but rather a summary name for a group of necessary, though empirical and isolated, attempts to bring under control that range of submerged faculty which has already from time to time risen into our observation.

The inquiry has been mainly the work of a few distinguished men, who have each of them pushed some useful ideas as far as they could, but whose work has not been adequately supported by successors.

I should much doubt whether there have been a hundred men in all countries together, at the ordinary level of professional intelligence, who during the century since Mesmer have treated hypnotism as the serious study of their lives. Some few of the men who have so treated it have been men of great force and strong convictions; and it will be found that there has consequently been a series of sudden developments of groups of phenomena, differing much from each other, but corresponding with the special beliefs and desires of the person who headed each movement in turn. I will mention some of the chief examples, so as to show the sporadic nature of the efforts made, and the great variety of the phenomena elicited.

The first name that must be mentioned is, of course, that of Mesmer himself. He believed primarily in a sanative effluence, and his method seems to have been a combination of pa.s.ses, suggestion, and a supposed "metallotherapy" or "magneto-therapy"--the celebrated _baquet_--which no doubt was merely a form of suggestion. His results, though very imperfectly described, seem to have been peculiar to himself. The _crise_ which many of his patients underwent sounds like a hysterical attack; but there can be no doubt that rapid improvement in symptoms often followed it, or he would not have made so great an impression on _savants_ as well as on the fashionable world of Paris. To Mesmer, then, we owe the first conception of the therapeutic power of a sudden and profound nervous change. To Mesmer, still more markedly, we owe the doctrine of a nervous influence or effluence pa.s.sing from man to man,--a doctrine which, though it must a.s.sume a less exclusive importance than he a.s.signed to it, cannot, in my view, be altogether ignored or denied.

The leading figure among his immediate successors, the Marquis de Puysegur, seems from his writings[57] to have been one of the ablest and most candid men who have practised mesmerism; and he was one of the very few who have conducted experiments, other than therapeutic, on a large scale. The somnambulic state may also be said to have been his discovery; and he obtained clairvoyance or telaesthesia in so many instances, and recorded them with so much of detail, that it is hard to attribute all to mal-observation, or even to telepathy from persons present. Other observers, as Bertrand, a physician of great promise, followed in the same track, and this brief period was perhaps the most fertile in disinterested experiments that our subject has yet known.

Much was then done in Germany also; and there, too, there is scattered testimony to supernormal powers.[58]

Next came the era of Elliotson in England, and of Esdaile in his hospital at Calcutta. Their method lay in mesmeric pa.s.ses, Elliotson's object being mostly the direct cure of maladies, Esdaile's a deep anaesthesia, under which he performed hundreds of serious operations. His success in this direction was absolutely unique;--was certainly (setting aside supernormal phenomena) the most extraordinary performance in mesmeric history. Had not his achievements been matters of official record, the apparent impossibility of repeating them would probably by this time have been held to have disproved them altogether.

The next great step which hypnotism made was actually regarded by Elliotson and his group as a hostile demonstration. When Braid discovered that hypnosis could be induced without pa.s.ses, the mesmerists felt that their theory of a sanative effluence was dangerously attacked.

And this was true; for that theory has in fact been thrown into the shade,--too completely so, in my opinion,--first by the method used in Braid's earlier work of the production of hypnotic phenomena by means of the upward and inward squint, and secondly, by the much wider and more important discovery of the efficacy of mere _suggestion_, set forth in his later writings. Braid's hypnotic experience differed much from that of hypnotists before and after him. His early method of the convergent squint produced results which no one else has been able to produce; and the state which it induced appeared in his view to arrest and dissipate even maladies of which neither hypnotist nor patient had thought as capable of cure. But he afterwards abandoned this method in favour of simple verbal suggestion, as he found that what was required was merely to influence the ideas of his patients. He showed further that all so-called phrenological phenomena and the supposed effects of magnets, metals, etc., could be produced equally well by suggestion.[59] He also laid stress on the subject's power both of resisting the commands of the operator and of inducing hypnotic effects in himself without the aid of an operator. To my mind the most important novelty brought out by Braid was the possibility of self-hypnotisation by concentration of will. This inlet into human faculty, in some ways the most important of all, has been as yet but slackly followed. But it is along with Braid's group of ideas that I should place those of an able but much inferior investigator, Dr. Fahnestock, although it is not clear that the latter knew of Braid's work. His book, _Statuvolism, or Artificial Somnambulism_ (Chicago, 1871), has received less attention than it merits;--partly perhaps from its barbarous t.i.tle, partly from the crudities with which it is enc.u.mbered, and partly from the fact of its publication at what was at that date a town on the outskirts of civilisation. Fahnestock seems to have obtained by self-suggestion with healthy persons results in some ways surpa.s.sing anything since recorded.

There is no reason to doubt these results, except the fact that they have not yet been repeated with equal success; and my present purpose is to show how little importance can as yet be attached in the history of hypnotic experiment to the mere absence thus far of successful repet.i.tion.

The next great stage was again strikingly different. It was mainly French; the impulse was given largely by Professor Charles Richet, whose work has proved singularly free from narrowness or misconception; but the movement was developed in a special and a very unfortunate direction by Charcot and his school. It is a remarkable fact that although Charcot was perhaps the only man of eminence whose professional reputation has ever been raised by his dealings with hypnotism, most of his work thereon is now seen to have been mistaken and aberrant,--a mere following of a blind alley, from which his disciples are now gradually returning. Charcot's leading phenomena (as with several of his predecessors above mentioned) were of a type which has seldom since been obtained. The once celebrated "three stages" of the _grand hypnotisme_ are hardly anywhere now to be seen. But in this case the reason is not that other hypnotists could not obtain the phenomena if they would; it is rather (as I have already indicated) that experience has convinced them that the sequences and symptoms on which Charcot laid stress were merely very elaborate products of the long-continued, and, so to say, endemic suggestions of the Salpetriere.

We come next to the movement which is now on the whole dominant, and to which the greatest number of cures may at present be credited. The school of Nancy--which originated with Liebeault, and which is now gradually merging into a general consensus of hypnotic practice--threw aside more and more decisively the supposed "somatic signs" of Charcot,--the phenomena of neuro-muscular irritability and the like, which he regarded as the requisite proof of hypnosis;--until Bernheim boldly affirmed that hypnotic trance was no more than sleep, and that hypnotic suggestion was at once the sole cause of hypnotic responsiveness and yet was undifferentiated from mere ordinary advisory speech. This was unfortunately too good to be true. Not one sleep in a million is really hypnosis; not one suggestion in a million reaches or influences the subliminal self. If Bernheim's theories, in their extreme form, were true, there would by this time have been no sufferers left to heal.

What Bernheim has done is to cure a number of people without mesmeric pa.s.ses, and without any special predisposing belief on either side,--beyond a trust in his own power. And this is a most valuable achievement, especially as showing how much may be _dispensed with_ in hypnotic practice--to how simple elements it may be reduced.

"Hypnotic trance," says Bernheim, in effect, "is ordinary sleep; hypnotic suggestion is ordinary command. You tell the patient to go to sleep, and he goes to sleep; you tell him to get well, and he gets well immediately." Even thus (one thinks) has one heard the conjuror explaining "how it's done,"--with little resulting hope of emulating his brilliant performance. An ordinary command does _not_ enable an ordinary man to get rid of his rheumatism, or to detest the previously too acceptable taste of brandy. In suggestion, in short, there must needs be something more than a name; a profound nervous change must needs be started by some powerful nervous stimulus from without or from within.

Before contenting ourselves with Bernheim's formula, we must consider yet again what change we want to effect, and whether hypnotists have actually used any form of stimulus which was likely to effect it.

According to Bernheim we are all naturally suggestible, and what we want to effect through suggestion is increased suggestibility. But let us get rid for the moment of that oracular word. What it seems to mean here is mainly a readier obedience of the organism to what we wish it to do. The sleep or trance with which hypnotism is popularly identified is not essential to our object, for the subliminal modifications are sometimes attained without any trace of somnolence. Let us consider, then, whether any known nervous stimuli, either ma.s.sive or specialised, tend to induce--not mere sleep or catalepsy--but that kind of ready modifiability,--of _responsiveness_ both in visible gesture and in invisible nutritive processes,--for the sake of which hypnosis is in serious practice induced.

Now of the external stimuli which influence the whole nervous system the most conspicuous are narcotic drugs. Opium, alcohol, chloroform, cannabis indica, etc., affect the nerves in so many strange ways that one might hope that they would be of use as hypnotic agents. And some observers have found that slight chloroformisation rendered subjects more suggestible. Janet has cited one case where suggestibility was developed during recovery from delirium tremens. Other hypnotisers (as Bramwell) have found chloroform fail to render patients hypnotisable; and alcohol is generally regarded as a positive hindrance to hypnotic susceptibility. More experiment with various narcotics is much needed; but thus far the scantiness of proof that narcotics help towards hypnosis goes rather against the view that hypnosis is a direct physiological sequence from any form of external stimulus.

The apparent resemblance, indeed, between narcosis and hypnosis diminishes on a closer a.n.a.lysis. A stage may occur both in narcotised and in hypnotised subjects where there is incoherent, dream-like mentation; but in the narcotised subject this is a step towards inhibition of the whole nervous energy--the highest centres being paralysed first; whereas in hypnosis the inhibition of supraliminal faculty seems often at least to be merely a necessary preliminary to the liberation of fresh faculty which presently manifests itself from a profounder region of the self.

Next take another group of ma.s.sive effects produced on the nervous system by external stimuli;--those forms, namely, of trance and cataplexy which are due to sudden shock. With human beings this phenomenon varies from actual death from failure of heart-action, or paralysis, or _stupor attonitus_ (a recognised form of insanity), any of which may result from a mere alarming sight or unwelcome announcement, down to the cataleptic immobility of a Salpetriere patient, when she hears a sudden stroke on the gong.

Similar phenomena in certain animals, as frogs, beetles, etc., are well known. It is doubtful, however, whether any of these sudden disablements should be cla.s.sed as true hypnoses. It has not, I think, been shown that in any case they have induced any real responsiveness to control, or power of obeying suggestion; unless it be (as in some Salpetriere cases) a form of suggestion so obvious and habitual that the obedience thereto may be called part of the actual cataplexy itself. Thus the "wax-like flexibility" of the cataleptic, whose arms remain in the position where you place them, must not be regarded as a readier obedience to control, but rather as a state which involves not a more but a less alert and capable responsiveness of the organism to either external or internal stimuli.

So with regard to animals--crocodiles, frogs, and the like. I hold theoretically that animals are probably hypnotisable and suggestible; and the records of Rarey's horse-taming, etc., seem to point in that direction.[60] But in the commoner experiments with frogs, where mere pa.s.sivity is produced, the resemblance seems to extend only to the lethargic stage in human beings,[61] and what relation that lethargy bears to suggestibility is not, I think, really known; although I shall later on suggest some explanation on psychological grounds.

It seems plain, at any rate, that it must be from stimuli applied to men and not to animals, and from stimuli of a special and localised rather than of a ma.s.sive kind, that we shall have to learn whatever can be learnt as to the genesis of the true hypnotic control.

Now there exists a way of inducing hypnosis in some hysterical persons which seems intermediate between ma.s.sive and localised stimulations. It is indeed a local stimulation; but there seems no reason beyond some deep-seated caprice of the organism why the special tract which is thus sensitive should have become developed in that direction.

I speak of the induction of trance in certain subjects by pressure upon so-called _hypnogenous zones_. These zones form a curious development of hysterical _cliniques_. Their starting-point is the well-known phenomenon of patches of anaesthesia found upon hysterical subjects--the "witch-marks" of our ancestors.

So far as we at present know, the situation of these "marks" is altogether capricious. It does not apparently depend, that is to say, upon any central lesion, in the same way as do the "referred pains,"

familiar in deep-seated organic complaints, which manifest themselves by superficial patches of tenderness, explicable by the distribution of nerve-trunks. The anaesthetic patches are an example of what I have called the irrational self-suggestions of the hypnotic stratum;--determined by dream-like fancies rather than necessitated by purely physiological antecedents.

Quite in accordance with this view, we find that under favourable conditions--especially in a hospital of hysterics--these anomalous patches or zones develop and specialise themselves in various ways.

Under Dr. Pitres at Bordeaux (for example), we have _zones hysterogenes_, _zones hypnogenes_, _zones hypnofrenatrices_, etc.; that is to say, he finds that pressure on certain spots in certain subjects will bring on or will check hysterical accesses, or accesses of what is ranked as hypnotic sleep. There is no doubt that this sleep does in certain subjects follow instantly upon the pressure of certain spots,--constant for each subject, but different for one subject and for another;--and this without any conscious co-operation, or even foreknowledge, on the patient's part. Stated thus nakedly, this seems the strongest possible instance of the induction of hypnosis by localised stimulus. The reader, however, will at once understand that in my view there is here no simple physiological sequence of cause and effect. I must regard the local pressure as a mere _signal_--an appeal to the pre-formed capacities of lawlessly acting centres in the hypnotic stratum. A sc.r.a.p of the self has decided, in dreamlike fashion, that pressure on a certain point of the body's surface shall produce sleep;--just as it has decided that pressure on that same point or on some other point shall _not_ produce pain. Self-suggestion, and no mere physiological nexus, is responsible for the sleep or the hysterical access which follows the touch. The anaesthetic patches are here a direct, but a capriciously chosen avenue to the subliminal being, and the same random self-suggestiveness which is responsible for frequent determinations that hysterical subjects shall _not_ be hypnotised has in this case decided that they _shall_ be hypnotised, if you go about it in exactly the right way.

Next in order among forms of localised stimulus used for inducing hypnosis may be placed _monotonous stimulation_,--to whatever part of the body it be applied. It was at one time the fashion to attribute almost all hypnotic phenomena to this cause, and Edmund Gurney and I endeavoured to point out the exaggeration.[62] Of this presently; but first let us consider the few cases where the monotonous stimulation has undoubtedly been of a kind to affect the organism strongly. The late Dr.

Auguste Voisin, of Paris, was perhaps more markedly successful than any physician in producing hypnosis in extreme cases;--in maniacal persons especially, whose attention it seemed impossible to fix. He often accomplished this by holding their eyes open with the blepharostat, and compelling them to gaze, sometimes for hours together, at a brilliant electric light. Exhaustion produces tranquillity and an almost comatose sleep--in which the physician has often managed to give suggestions of great value. This seems practically the only cla.s.s of cases where a directly physiological antecedent for the sleep can be proved; and even here the provable effect is rather the exhaustion of morbid excitability than any direct induction of suggestibility. This dazzling process is generally accompanied with vigorous verbal suggestion; and it is, of course, quite possible that the patients might have been thrown into hypnosis by that suggestion alone, had their minds been capable at first of sufficient attention to receive it.

Braid's upward and inward squint has an effect of the same deadening kind as the long gazing at a light, and helps in controlling wandering attention; but Braid himself in later years (as mentioned above) attributed his hypnotic successes wholly to _suggestion_.

From monotonous excitations which, whatever their part in inducing hypnosis, are, at any rate, such as can sensibly affect the organism, I come down to the trivial monotonies of watch-tickings, "pa.s.ses," etc., which are still by a certain school regarded as capable of producing a profound change in the nervous condition of the person before whose face the hypnotiser's hands are slowly waved for ten or twenty minutes. I regard this as a much exaggerated view. The clock's ticking, for instance, if it is marked at all, is at least as likely to irritate as to soothe; and the constant experience of life shows that continued monotonous stimuli, say the throbbing of the screw at sea, soon escape notice and produce no hypnotic effect at all. It is true, indeed, that monotonous rocking sends some babies to sleep; but other babies are merely irritated by the process, and such soporific effect as rocking may possess is probably an effect on spinal centres or on the semicircular ca.n.a.ls. It depends less on mere monotony than on ma.s.sive movement of the whole organism.

I think, then, that there is no real ground for supposing that the trivial degree of monotonous stimulation produced by pa.s.ses often repeated can induce in any ordinary physiological manner that "profound nervous change" which is recognised as the prerequisite condition of any hypnotic results. I think that pa.s.ses are effectual generally as mere suggestions, and must _prima facie_ be regarded in that light, as they are, in fact, regarded by many experienced hypnotisers (as Milne Bramwell) who have employed them with good effect. Afterwards, when reason is given for believing in a telepathic influence or impact occasionally transmitted from the operator to the subject at a distance, we shall consider whether pa.s.ses may represent some other form of the same influence, operating in close physical contiguity.

First, however, let us consider the point which we have now reached. We have successively dismissed various supposed modes of physiologically inducing hypnotic trance. We stand at present in the position of the Nancy school;--we have found nothing but _suggestion_ which really induces the phenomena.

But on the other hand we cannot possibly regard the word suggestion as any real answer to the important question _how_ the hypnotic responsiveness is induced, on _what_ conditions it depends.[63]

It must be remembered that many of the results which follow upon suggestion are of a type which no amount of willingness to follow the suggestion could induce, since they lie quite outside the voluntary realm. However disposed a man may be to believe me, however anxious to please me, one does not see how that should enable him, for instance, to govern the morbidly-secreting cells in an eruption of erysipelas. He already fruitlessly wishes them to stop their inflammation; the mere fact of my expressing the same wish can hardly alter his cellular tissue.

Here, then, we come to an important conclusion which cannot well be denied, yet is seldom looked fully in the face. Suggestion from without must for the most part resolve itself into suggestion from within.

Unless there be some telepathic or other supernormal influence at work between hypnotiser and patient (which I shall presently show ground for believing to be sometimes, though not often, the case), the hypnotiser can plainly do nothing by his word of command beyond starting a train of thought which the patient has in most cases started many times for himself with no result; the difference being that now at last the patient starts it again, and it _has_ a result. But _why_ it thus succeeds on this particular occasion, we simply do not know. We cannot predict when the result will occur; still less can we bring it about at pleasure.

Nay, we do not even know whether it might not be possible to dispense altogether with suggestion from outside in most of the cases now treated in this way, and merely to teach the patient to make the suggestions for himself. If there be no "mesmeric effluence" pa.s.sing from hypnotiser to patient, the hypnotiser seems little more than a mere _objet de luxe_;--a personage provided simply to impress the imagination, who must needs become even absurdly useless so soon as it is understood that he has no other function or power.

Self-suggestion, whatever this may really mean, is thus in most cases, whether avowedly or not, at the bottom of the effect produced. It has already been used most successfully, and it will probably become much commoner than it now is;--or, I should rather say (since every one no doubt suggests to himself when he is in pain that he would like the pain to cease), I antic.i.p.ate that self-suggestion, by being in some way better directed, will become more _effective_, and that the average of voluntary power over the organism will rise to a far higher level than it at present reaches. I believe that this is taking place even now; and that certain _schemes of self-suggestion_, so to call them, are coming into vogue, where patients in large ma.s.ses are supplied with effective conceptions, which they thus impress repeatedly upon themselves without the need of a hypnotiser's attendance on each occasion. The "Miracles of Lourdes" and the cures effected by "Christian Science" fall, in my view, under this category. We have here suggestions given to a quant.i.ty of more or less suitable people _en ma.s.se_, much as a platform hypnotiser gives suggestions to a mixed audience, some of whom may then be affected without individual attention from himself. The suggestion of the curative power of the Lourdes water, for instance, is thus thrown out, partly in books, partly by oral addresses; and a certain percentage of persons succeed in so persuading themselves of that curative efficacy that when they bathe in the water they are actually cured.

These _schemes of self-suggestion_, as I have termed them, const.i.tute one of the most interesting parts of my subject, but s.p.a.ce forbids that I should enter into a discussion of them here. It is sufficient to point out that in order to make self-suggestion operative, no strong belief or enthusiasm, such as those schemes imply, is really necessary. No recorded cases of self-suggestion, I think, are more instructive than those published by Dr. Hugh Wingfield in _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. v.

p. 279. (The paper was printed anonymously.) Dr. Wingfield was a Demonstrator in Physiology in the University of Cambridge, and his subjects were mainly candidates for the Natural Sciences Tripos. In these cases there was no excitement of any kind, and no previous belief.

The phenomena occurred incidentally during a series of experiments on other points, and were a surprise to every one concerned. The results achieved were partly automatic writing and partly phenomena of neuro-muscular excitability;--stiffening of the arms, and so forth. "It seems probable," says Dr. Wingfield, "that all phenomena capable of being produced by the suggestion of the hypnotiser can also be produced by self-suggestion in a self-suggestive subject."

Experiments like these--confirming with modern care the conclusions reached by Fahnestock and others at various points in hypnotic history--seem to me to open a new inlet into human faculty, as surprising in its way as those first wild experiments of Mesmer himself.

Who would have supposed that a healthy undergraduate could "by an effort of mind" throw his whole body into a state of cataleptic rigidity, so that he could rest with his heels on one chair and his head on another?