Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/239

 226 E. GUENEY : ception have any validity, to conceive that the brain- changes correlated with the desire of A, who remains normally awake, to entrance B at a distance, could directly cause the quite different changes which B's brain undergoes during entrancement, would be like conceiving a struck tuning-fork as able to set into vibration a fork of a dif- ferent pitch, or the proximity of magnetised iron as able to convert a piece of wood into a magnet. And indeed it is hard to conceive how, if sympathetic action be excluded, one brain should ever get touch or prise of the other : it is just the sympathetic response which is the condition of response at all. Why, again, should A's cerebration have more virtue than anyone else's, no idea of him ex liypotliesi being conveyed ? His peculiar influence has been established entirely by a particular association of ideas in the ' subject's ' mind ; that is the only part of the hypnogenetic process with which his personality is identified ; and if such a thing existed as a specific physical power which would enable that part of the process to be skipped, and the ' subject's ' brain to be attacked in a new way at some new or lower point, no ground appears why A and A alone should possess it. It must be clear, I think, how different in kind these ob- jections are from those which were admitted as applying, on the physical side, to the conception of mental suggestion or thought-transference. For there, even if we rejected (on account of the distance between the two brains) the notion of a direct physical nexus even if we felt driven to regard the changes in B's brain as immediately conditioned, not by the changes in A's brain, but by the psychical appearance of the idea transferred to B's mind such conditioning in B would involve only the world-old correlation of psychical with nervous changes in the individual ; a correlation which, however variously interpreted, is recognised as universal, or at any rate as the rough expression of some deeper reality which is universal. So far, then, there appears no very plausible alternative to the view which finds the key of telepathic hypnotism in actual suggestion, conveyed as a transferred idea from A's mind to B's. But this view can be reinforced by a further consideration. As a matter of fact, there is no instance on record (except Esdaile's mentioned before) of a person's being hypnotised from a distance whom the operator has not pre- viously hypnotised by some ordinary process. On the theory of mental suggestion, this is of course just what we might ex- pect. Since a person new to hypnotism has never been hyp- notised for the first time by the mere idea of the trance ver-