Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/233

 220 E. GUENEY : record of some recent experiments of the same sort which he has made with M. Janet's * subject,' Mme. B. On one occasion, early in the morn- ing, he fixed the hour for his trial, 9 o'clock, by drawing a card at random ; and found in the afternoon that Mme. B. had been seized with intolerable fatigue and somnolence while dressing, at 9'5. On another occasion he took a quite sudden resolution, and made the attempt from 6'25 to 6'45 P.M.; Mme. B. was entranced at 6'40, after a fruitless effort to ward off the condition by putting her hands in cold water. The full account will shortly be published. In regarding such distant effects as these, it was of course inevitable, from the first, that an effort should be made to connect them with the similar effects produced by the hypnotiser in the presence of his ' subject ' ; and in the pre-scientific days of hypnotism this was easy enough. The prevalent view of hypnotic effects, among those who believed them to be genuine, was that they were produced by a specific ' magnetic ' or ' mesmeric ' force or effluence which radiated from the person of the operator in obedience to his will ; and as it is easy to credit unknown agencies with incomprehensible attributes, the idea of this one as able to act at a distance without any loss of intensity was accepted as needing no particular justification. If such a Eeculiarity prevented the mesmeric force from being corre- ited in any way with the forces known to physicists, that w r ould appear to its champions as so much to its credit. Not that I regard the idea of a specific hypnogenetic influence of a physical sort as absurd I shall recur later to the question of such an influence acting within narrow limits of space ; and even as regards its operation at any distance and across any obstacles, something might be said for a hypothesis which at least had the merit of recognising the telepathic facts, as long as no alternative was possible. This, however, is no longer the case. A conception which, in its simple and comprehensive form, is of very recent date, and which could never have been educed, free of all confusing elements, from the facts of hypnotism alone the conception of thought -transference has opened the way for another theory. Not one, indeed I should most fully admit for which any certainty or finality can be claimed ; it requires assumptions, and depends largely on analogies ; but one which, as an attempt at generalisation, reaches, I think, a, considerable degree of probability in a region of facts so new and baffling that no generalisation can as yet well aspire to more. To state my view in the shortest way, I believe that hypnotisation at a distance is truly analogous to hypnotisa- tion in the presence of the ' subject,' but to one particular