Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/417

 404 E. GUENEY : causes may naturally have rare consequences, there is no difficulty in supposing that a consequence of this special relation is a special subsequent penetrability (so to speak) of one mind by the other a partial weakening, in a single direction, of the barrier which normally isolates individuals, and confines the experience of each to sensations received through the recognised channels or ideas originated by his own activities. Not, of course, that we should have had any right to predict such a consequence : telepathy could never be deduced a priori from anything else. But when, as a matter of fact, we find psychical transferences taking place between certain persons after, and not before, their minds have been in a certain peculiar relation to one another, it is impossible not to suspect that this relation is a vital condition of the transference ; and if this relation has ceased to show itself in any recognisable form at the time when the trans- ferences are observed, we can but seek the immediate condi- tion in the permanent impression which it has left. This permanent impression, then, and nothing else is the rapport ; and it will be seen how everything exceptional and mysteri- ous has now disappeared out of it. In the line of conditions the only exceptional part was found to lie elsewhere in the well-recognised psychological peculiarities of the hypnotic state ; and the rapport itself, as the abiding latent sense of past relations, proves to be fundamentally the same in kind as that which has pre-existed in a large majority of the spontaneous telepathic cases where the ' agent ' and ' per- cipient ' have been connected by ties of affection or acquaint- ance, which we may equally call specific, in the sense of being personal to each pair, but not with any more occult reference. And if rapport, as a hypnogenetic condition, is not excep- tional in kind, neither does it seem necessary to suppose it exceptional in strength to suppose, that is, that it facilitates the telepathic transference in a higher degree than is pos- sible or common in cases unconnected with hypnotism. For we must distinguish the transference as such from its further the part of the ' subjects,' to the substance and tone of remarks made by the operator in their presence, and a far stronger impulse to satisfy him, than would be exhibited by persons of the same degree of intelligence and education in ordinary life, or than would be guessed from the appearance of dulness and apathy which is usual to a hypnotised person when no direct appeal is made to him from outside. I am glad of this opportunity of modifying some expressions in a former paper (MiND ix. pp. 489-90) where a too large concession was made to the idea that psychical functions are abolished, or nearly abolished, in the lethargic stage of hypnotism.