Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/419

 406 E. GUBNEY : also worth noting on their own account in connexion with the subject of ' rapport '. A hypnotised person will sometimes be able to detect the faint whisper of his hypnotiser, amid a babel of sound which makes it absolutely indistinguishable to anyone else. 1 How is this fact to be accounted for? Certainly not by hyperaesthesia of the sense of hearing ; for no such condition is observed in relation to any other sound. We must again fall back on rapport but again on rapport of a quite comprehensible kind. It will consist, not now (as in the cases of hypnotisation by suggestion) of the ' subject's ' memory of his past relations to his hypnotiser, but in his sense of the present relation the pervading dominance of the idea of that one particular person in a mind whose reflective and discursive powers are in abeyance, and whose passive absorption is undisturbed by competing images. This dominant idea is now the vulnerable spot ; and consequently a stimulus which strikes that spot in other words which impresses the sensorium in a manner previously associated with impressions of the hypnotiser wakes a reverberation which detaches itself in consciousness. But for the purpose of my illustration the point to observe is that the stimulus acts equally on the other persons present ; for in the midst of perfect stillness they would hear the whisper, and, as an element in the total of sound th#t is being produced around them, it must undoubtedly affect their sensorium ; only, not falling on any vulnerable spot, it is totally unobserved. Just so, I conceive, the psychical stimulus in the cases of tele- pathic transference : the transference may take place, and produce a certain psychical result ; but, without the appro- priate condition, that result will not reach any appreciable strength. The condition of response might be compared to a sounding-board : a number of strings may be faintly stirred by the telepathic wave ; but only those which are backed by a sounding-board will reverberate audibly. That only a small minority of minds should naturally present this condition is not a point of any difficulty or at any rate is one admit- ting of just as much and just as little explanation as that a small minority of persons should be hyper-sensitive in any other direction. But where the condition exists, the rap- prochement of the rare natural hyper-sensitiveness of the ordinary telepathic percipient to the rare artificial hyper- sensitiveness of the hypnotic * subject ' appears to me to be both legitimate and instructive ; while the rejection which it involves of the idea of ' mesmeric ' rapport, as anything 1 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. i. 255-6.