Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death Part 15

I will begin, then, with what seems the most external and measurable of these different influences--the influence, namely, of suggestion upon man's _perceptive_ faculties;--its power to educate his external organs of sense.

This wide subject is almost untouched as yet; and there is no direction in which one could be more confident of interesting results from further experiment.

The exposition falls naturally into three parts, as suggestion effects one or other of the three following objects:

(1) Restoration of ordinary senses from some deficient condition.

(2) Verification of ordinary senses;--hyperaesthesiae.

(3) Development of new senses;--heteraesthesiae.

(1) The first of these three headings seems at first sight to belong to therapeutics rather than to psychology. It is, however, indispensable as a preliminary to the other two heads; since by learning how and to what extent suggestion can repair _defective_ senses we have the best chance of guessing at its _modus operandi_ when it seems to excite the _healthy_ senses to a point beyond their normal powers.[77]

Two points may be mentioned here. Improvement of _vision_ seems sometimes to result from relaxation of an involuntary ciliary spasm, which habitually over-corrects some defect of the lens. This is interesting, from the a.n.a.logy thus shown in quite healthy persons to the fixed ideas, the subliminal errors and fancies characteristics of hysteria. The stratum of self whose business it is to correct the mechanical defect of the eye has in these instances done so amiss, and cannot set itself right. The corrected form of vision is as defective as the form of vision which it replaced. But if the state of trance be induced, or if it occur spontaneously, it sometimes happens that the error is suddenly righted; the patient lays aside spectacles; and since we must a.s.sume that the original defect of mechanism remains, it seems that that defect is now perfectly instead of imperfectly met. This shows a subliminal adjusting power operating during trance more intelligently than the supraliminal intelligence had been able to operate during waking life.

Another point of interest lies in the effect of increased attention, as stimulated by suggestion, upon the power of hearing. Dr. Liebeault[78]

records two cases which are among the most significant that I know. If such susceptibility to self-suggestion could be reached by patients generally, there might be, with no miracle at all, a removal of perhaps half the annoyance which deafness inflicts on mankind.

I pa.s.s on to cases of the production by suggestion or self-suggestion of hyperaesthesia,--of a degree of sensory delicacy which overpa.s.ses the ordinary level, and the previous level of the subject himself.

The rudimentary state of our study of hypnotism is somewhat strangely ill.u.s.trated by the fact that most of the experiments which show hyperaesthesia most delicately have been undertaken with a view of proving something else--namely, mesmeric _rapport_, or the mesmerisation of objects, or telepathy. In these cases the proof of _rapport_, telepathy, etc., generally just falls short,--because one cannot say that the action of the ordinary senses might not have reached the point necessary for the achievement, though there is often good reason to believe that the subject was supraliminally ignorant of the way in which he was, in fact, attaining the knowledge in question.

In these extreme cases, indeed, the explanation by hyperaesthesia is not always proved. There _may_ have been telepathy, although one has not the right to a.s.sume telepathy, in view of certain slighter, but still remarkable, hyperaesthetic achievements, which are common subjects of demonstration. The ready recognition of _points de repere_, on the back of a card or the like, which are hardly perceptible to ordinary eyes, is one of the most usual of these performances.

In this connection the question arises as to the existence of physiological limits to the exercise of the ordinary senses. In the case of the eye a _minimum visibile_ is generally a.s.sumed; and there is special interest in a case of clairvoyance versus cornea-reading, where, if the words were read (as appears most probable) from their reflection upon the cornea of the hypnotiser, the common view as to the _minimum visibile_ is greatly stretched.[79]

With regard to the other senses, whose mechanism is less capable of minute dissection, one meets problems of a rather different kind. What are the definitions of smell and touch? Touch is already split up into various factors--tactile, algesic, thermal; and thermal touch is itself a duplicate sense, depending apparently on one set of nerve-terminations adapted to perceive heat, and another set adapted to perceive cold.

Taste is similarly split up; and we do not call anything taste which is not definitely referred to the mouth and adjacent regions. Smell is vaguer; and there are cognate sensations (like that of the presence of a cat) which are not referred by their subject to the nose. The study of hyperaesthesia does in this sense prepare the way for what I have termed heteraesthesia; in that it leaves us more cautious in definition as to what the senses are, it accustoms us to the notion that people become aware of things in many ways which they cannot definitely realise.

Let us now consider the evidence for heteraesthesia;--for the existence, that is to say, under hypnotic suggestion, of any form of sensibility decidedly different from those with which we are familiar. It would sound more accurate if one could say "demanding some end-organ different from those which we know that we possess." But we know too little of the range of perceptivity of these end-organs in the skin which we are gradually learning to distinguish--of the heat-feeling spots, cold-feeling spots, and the like--to be able to say for what purposes a new organ would be needed. For certain heteraesthetic sensations, indeed, as the perception of a magnetic field, one can hardly a.s.sume that any end-organ would be necessary. It is better, therefore, to speak only of modes of sensibility.

Looking at the matter from the evolutionary point of view, the question among sensations was one of the development of the fittest; that is to say that, as the organism became more complex and needed sensations more definite than sufficed for the protozoon, certain sensibilities got themselves defined and stereotyped upon the organism by the evolution of end-organs.[80] Others failed to get thus externalised; but may, for aught we know, persist nevertheless in the central organs;--say, for instance, in what for man are the optic or olfactory tracts of the brain. There will then be no apparent reason why these latent powers should not from time to time receive sufficient stimulus, either from within or from without, to make them perceptible to the waking intelligence, or perceptible at least in states (like trance) of narrow concentration.

As the result of these considerations, I approach alleged heteraesthesiae of various kinds with no presumption whatever against their real occurrence. Yet on the other hand, my belief in the extent of possible _hyperaesthesia_ continually suggests to me that the apparently new perceptions may only consist of a mixture of familiar forms of perception, pushed to a new extreme, and centrally interpreted with a new ac.u.men, while there is no doubt that many experiments supposed to furnish evidence of such new perceptions merely ill.u.s.trate the effect of suggestion or self-suggestion.

Without, however, presuming to criticise past evidence wholesale, I yet hope that the experience now attained may lead to a much greater number of well-guarded experiments in the near future. In Appendix V.A, I very briefly present the actual state of this inquiry. In default of any logical principle, I shall there divide these alleged forms of sensibility according as they are excited by inorganic objects on the one hand, or by organisms (dead or living) on the other.

In the meantime I pa.s.s on to that group of the dynamogenic effects of suggestion which affect the more central vital operations--either the vaso-motor system, or the neuro-muscular system, or the central sensory tracts. The effects of suggestion on character--induced changes to which we can hardly guess the nervous concomitant--will remain to be dealt with later.

First, then, as to the effects of suggestion on the vaso-motor system.

Simple effects of this type form the commonest of "platform experiments." The mesmerist holds ammonia under his subject's nose, and tells him it is rose-water. The subject smells it eagerly, and his eyes do not water. The suggestion, that is to say, that the stinging vapour is inert has inhibited the vaso-motor reflexes which would ordinarily follow, and which no ordinary effort of will could restrain. _Vice versa_, when the subject smells rose-water, described as ammonia, he sneezes and his eyes water. These results, which his own will could not produce, follow on the mesmerist's word. No one who sees these simple tests applied can doubt the genuineness of the influence at work. We find then, as might be expected, that action on glands and secretions const.i.tutes a large element in hypnotic therapeutics. The literature of suggestion is full of instances where a suppressed secretion has been restored at a previously arranged moment, almost with "astronomical punctuality." And yet to what memory is that command retained? by what signal is it announced? or by what agency obeyed?

In spite of this underlying obscurity, common to every branch of suggestion, these vaso-motor phenomena are by this time so familiar that no further description of them is necessary.

This delicate responsiveness of the vaso-motor system has given rise to some curious spontaneous phenomena, and has suggested some experiments, which are probably as yet in their infancy. The main point of interest is that at this point spontaneous self-suggestion, and subsequently suggestion from without, have made a kind of first attempt at the modification of the human organism in what may be called fancy directions,--at the production of a change which has no therapeutic aim, and so to say, no physiological unity; but which is guided by an intellectual caprice along lines with which the organism is not previously familiar. I speak of the phenomenon commonly known as "stigmatisation," from the fact that its earliest spontaneous manifestations were suggested by imaginations brooding on the stigmata of Christ's pa.s.sion;--the marks of wounds in hands and feet and side.

This phenomenon, which was long treated both by _savants_ and by devotees as though it must be either fraudulent or miraculous,--_ou supercherie, ou miracle_,--is now found (like a good many other phenomena previously deemed subject to that dilemma) to enter readily within the widening circuit of natural law. Stigmatisation is, in fact, a form of vesication; and suggested vesication--with the quasi-burns and real blisters which obediently appear in any place and pattern that is ordered--is a high development of that same vaso-motor plasticity of which the ammonia-rose-water experiment was an early example.[81]

The group of suggestive effects which we reach next in order is a wide and important one. The education of the _central sensory faculties_,--of our power of inwardly representing to ourselves sights and sounds, etc.,--is not less important than the education of the external senses.

The powers of construction and combination which our central organs possess differ more widely in degree in different healthy individuals than the degrees of external perception itself. And the stimulating influence of hypnotism on _imagination_ is perhaps the most conspicuous phenomenon which the whole subject offers; yet it has been little dwelt upon, save from one quite superficial point of view.

Every one knows that a hypnotised subject is easily hallucinated;--that if he is told to see a non-existent dog, he sees a dog,--that if he is told _not_ to see Mr. A., he sees everything in the room, Mr. A.

excepted. Common and conspicuous, I say, as this experiment is, even the scientific observer has too often dealt with it with the shallowness of the platform lecturer. The lecturer represents this induced hallucinability simply as an odd ill.u.s.tration of his own power over the subject. "I tell him to forget his name, and he forgets his name; I tell him that he has a baby on his lap, and he sees and feels and dandles it." At the best, such a hallucination is quoted as an instance of "mono-ideism." But the real kernel of the phenomenon is not the inhibition but the dynamogeny;--not the abstraction of attention or imagination from other topics, but the increased power which imagination gains under suggestion;--the development of faculty, useless, if you will, in that special form of imagining the baby, but faculty mentally of a high order--faculty in one shape or another essential to the production of almost all the most admired forms of human achievement.

On this theme I shall have much to say; yet here again it will be convenient to defer fuller discussion until I review what I have termed "sensory automatism" in a more general way. We shall then see that this quickened imaginative faculty is not educed by hypnosis alone; that it is a part of the equipment of the subliminal self, and will be better treated at length in connection with other spontaneous manifestations.

Enough here to have pointed out the main fact; for when pointed out it can hardly be disputed, although its significance for the true comprehension of hypnotic phenomena has been too often overlooked.

Yet here, and in direct connection with hypnotism, certain special features of hallucinations need to be insisted upon, both as partly explaining certain more advanced hypnotic phenomena, and also as suggesting lines of important experiment. The first point is this.

Post-hypnotic hallucinations can be _postponed_ at will. That is to say, a constant watchfulness is exercised by the subject, so that if, for example, the hypnotiser tells him that he will (when awakened) poke the fire when the hypnotiser has coughed three times, the awakened subject, although knowing nothing of the order in his waking state, will be on the look-out for the coughs, amid all other disturbances, and will poke the fire at the fore-ordained signal.[82] Moreover, when the post-hypnotic suggestion is executed there will often be a slight momentary relapse into the hypnotic state, and the subject will not afterwards be aware that he _has_ (for instance) poked the fire at all.

This means that the suggested act belongs properly to the hypnotic, not to the normal chain of memory; so that its performance involves a brief reappearance of the subliminal self which received the order.

Another characteristic of these suggested hallucinations tells in exactly the same direction. It is possible to suggest no mere isolated picture,--a black cat on the table, or the like,--but a whole complex series of responses to circ.u.mstances not at the time predictable. This point is well ill.u.s.trated by what are called "negative hallucinations"

or "systematised anaesthesiae." Suppose, for instance, that I tell a hypnotised subject that when he awakes there will be no one in the room with him but myself. He awakes and remembers nothing of this order, but sees me alone in the room. Other persons present endeavour to attract his attention in various ways. Sometimes he will be quite unconscious of their noises and movements; sometimes he will perceive them, but will explain them away, as due to other causes, in the same irrational manner as one might do in a dream. Or he may perceive them, be unable to explain them, and feel considerable terror until the "negative hallucination" is dissolved by a fresh word of command. It is plain, in fact, throughout, that some element in him is at work all the time in obedience to the suggestion given,--is keeping him by ever fresh modifications of his illusion from discovering its unreality. Nothing could be more characteristic of what I have called a "middle-level centre" of the subliminal self--of some element in his nature which is potent and persistent without being completely intelligent;--a kind of dream-producer, ready at any moment to vary and defend the dream.

Another indication of the subliminal power at work to produce these hallucinations is their remarkable _range_--a range as wide, perhaps, as that over which therapeutic effects are obtainable by suggestion. The post-hypnotic hallucination may affect not sight and hearing alone (to which spontaneous hallucinations are in most cases confined), but all kinds of vaso-motor responses and organic sensations--cardiac, stomachic, and the like--which no artifice can affect in a waking person. The legendary flow of perspiration with which the flatterer sympathises with his patron's complaint of heat--_si dixeris "aestuo,"

sudat_--is no exaggeration if applied to the hypnotic subject, who will often sweat and shiver at your bidding as you transplant him from the Equator to frosty Caucasus.

Well, then, given this strength and vigour of hallucination, one sees a possible extension of knowledge in more than one direction. To begin with, by suggestion to the subject that he is feeling or doing something which is beyond his normal range of faculties, we may perhaps enable him to perceive or to act as thus suggested.

What we need is to address to a sensitive subject a series of strong suggestions of the increase of his sensory range and power. We must needs begin by suggesting hallucinatory sensations:--the subject should be told that he perceives some stimulus which is, in fact, too feeble for ordinary perception. If you can make him _think_ that he perceives it, he probably will after a time perceive it; the direction given to his attention heightening either peripheral or central sensory faculty.

You may then be able to attack the question as to how far his specialised end-organs are really concerned in the perception;--and it may then be possible to deal in a more fruitful way with those alleged cases of _transposition of senses_ which have so great a theoretical interest as being apparently intermediate between hyperaesthesia and telaesthesia or clairvoyance. If we once admit (as I, of course, admit) the reality of telaesthesia, it is just in some such way as this that we should expect to find it beginning.

I start from the thesis that the perceptive power within us precedes and is independent of the specialised sense-organs, which it has developed for earthly use.

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I conceive further that under certain circ.u.mstances this primary telaesthetic faculty resumes direct operations, in spite of the fleshly barriers which are constructed so as to allow it to operate through certain channels alone. And I conceive that in thus resuming exercise of the wider faculty, the incarnate spirit will be influenced or hampered by the habits or self-suggestions of the more specialised faculty; so that there may be apparent _compromises_ of different kinds between telaesthetic and hyperaesthetic perception,--as the specialised senses endeavour, as it were, to retain credit for the perception which is in reality widening beyond their scope.

In this att.i.tude of mind, then, I approach the recorded cases of transposition of special sense.[83]

Two main hypotheses have been put forward as a general explanation of such cases, neither of which seems to me quite satisfactory. (1) The common theory would be that these are merely cases of erroneous self-suggestion;--that the subject really sees with the eye, but thinks that he sees with the knee, or the stomach, or the finger-tips. This may probably have been so in many, but not, I think, in all instances. (2) Dr. Prosper Despine and others suppose that, while the accustomed cerebral centres are still concerned in the act of sight, the finger-end (for example) acts for the nonce as the end-organ required to carry the visual sensation to the brain. I cannot here get over the mechanical difficulty of the absence of a lens. However hyperaesthetic the finger-end might be (say) to light and darkness, I can hardly imagine its acting as an organ of definite sight.

My own suggestion (which, for aught I know, may have been made before) is that the finger-end is no more a true organ of sight than the arbitrary "hypnogenous zone" is a true organ for inducing trance. I think it possible that there may be actual telaesthesia,--not necessarily involving any perception by the bodily organism;--and that the spirit which thus perceives in wholly supernormal fashion may be under the impression that it is perceiving through some bizarre corporeal channel--as the knee or the stomach. I think, therefore, that the perception may not be _optical_ sight at all, but rather some generalised telaesthetic perception represented as visual, but _incoherently_ so represented; so that it may be referred to the knee instead of the retina. And here again, as at several previous points in my argument, I must refer the reader to what will be said in my chapter on _Possession_ by external spirits (Chapter IX.) to ill.u.s.trate the operation even of the subject's own spirit acting without external aid.

And now I come to the third main type of the dynamogenic efficacy of suggestion: its influence, namely, on _attention_, on _will_, and on _character_--character, indeed, being largely a resultant of the direction and persistence of voluntary attention.

It will be remembered that for convenience' sake I have discussed the dynamogenic effect of suggestion first upon the external senses, then upon the internal sensibility,--the mind's eye, the mind's ear, and the imagination generally;--and now I am turning to similar effects exercised upon that central power which reasons upon the ideas and images which external and internal senses supply, which chooses between them, and which reacts according to its choice. These are "highest-level centres," which I began by saying that the hypnotist could rarely hope to reach;--since those spontaneous somnambulisms which the hypnotic trance imitates and develops do so seldom reach them. We have, however, already found a good deal of intelligence of a certain kind in hypnotic phenomena; what we do here is to pa.s.s from one stage to another and higher stage of consciousness of intelligent action.

To explain this statement, let us dwell for a moment upon the degree of intelligence which is sometimes displayed in those modifications of the organism which suggestion effects. Take, for instance, the formation of a cruciform blister, as recorded by Dr. Biggs, of Lima.[84] In this experiment the hypnotised subject was told that a red cross would appear on her chest every Friday during a period of four months. For the carrying out of this suggestion an unusual combination of capacities was needed;--the capacity of directing physiological changes in a new way, and also, and combined therewith, the capacity of recognising and imitating an abstract, arbitrary, non-physiological idea, such as that of _cruciformity_.

All this, in my view, is the expression of _subliminal_ control over the organism--more potent and profound than _supraliminal_, and exercised neither blindly nor wisely, but with intelligent caprice.

Bearing this in mind as we go on to suggestions more directly affecting central faculty, in which _highest-level_ centres begin to be involved, we need not be surprised to find an intermediate stage in which high faculties are used in obedience to suggestion, for purely capricious ends.

I speak of _calculations_ subliminally performed in the carrying out of post-hypnotic suggestions.

These suggestions _a echeance_--commands, given in the trance, to do something under certain contingent circ.u.mstances, or after a certain time has elapsed--form a very convenient mode of testing the amount of mentation which can be started and carried out without the intervention of the supraliminal consciousness. Experiments have been made in this direction by three men especially who have in recent times done some of the best work on the psychological side of hypnotism, namely, Edmund Gurney, Delbuf, and Milne Bramwell.

Dr. Milne Bramwell's experiments[85] (to mention these as a sample of the rest) were post-hypnotic suggestions involving arithmetical calculations; the entranced subject, for instance, being told to make a cross when 20,180 minutes had elapsed from the moment of the order.

Their primary importance lay in showing that a subliminal or hypnotic memory persisted across the intervening gulf of time,--days and nights of ordinary life,--and prompted obedience to the order when at last it fell due. But incidentally, as I say, it became clear that the subject, whose arithmetical capacity in common life was small, worked out these sums subliminally a good deal better than she could work them out by her normal waking intelligence.