Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/421

 408 E. GUENEY : jects ' would experiment with other persons who have proved to be sensitive 'percipients'. But such suggestions would be totally unpractical unless we might hope that as psychical research gradually becomes legitimised, the human material available for study will become less rare. To return now to the special hypnogenetic problems : I have shown grounds for believing that in some cases of hypnogenetic suggestion where the parties are together and the suggestion is conveyed by physical means, no less than where they are separated and the suggestion is psychical, a true psychical or telepathic agency is ex- ercised, of a sort foreign indeed to the hitherto-accepted theories of hypnotism, but equally remote from ' odic ' or ' mesmeric ' effluences. But if in these cases the first indispensable conditions of the effect present themselves as mental phenomena, the question naturally arises what rela- tion, if any, do mental phenomena hold to the other hypno- genetic methods, where the enhancement takes place (as with fresh ' subjects ' it almost always does take place) after the application of distinct physical processes ? I have purposely deferred these cases of primary hypnotisation till those of the secondary (or suggestional) class had been discussed, as being at the very outset harder to discriminate for this obvious reason : that while we can be sure that there is no effective exercise of bodily energy, when the ' subject ' is sitting apart or alone and the mode of influence is ostensibly mental, we cannot similarly be sure that there is no effective exercise of mental energy, when the operator takes him in hand and the mode of influence is ostensibly bodily. In the latter case, therefore, the actual or possible complication of causes makes analysis very difficult. The question is really a triple one ; for we may ask (1) whether the hypnotiser's mind has some direct share in the effect, originating a psychical transference in the sense of ' psychi- cal ' before explained (MiND No. 46, pp. 222-3); or, supposing his body alone to act directly, by touch, passes, &c., whether (2) the effect is purely mechanical and due simply to the pressure or the gentle stimulation which his muscles bring to bear, or (3) is of a more inscrutable and nervous sort ; in which last case, we must observe, his mind may condition it, as in the first case, though less directly since from whatever part of the body the nerve-force be supposed to act, the total of energy evolved may include certain cerebral changes of which certain mental facts, such as concentration, may be the necessary correlates. The second of these hypo- theses is, of course, the one in favour of which physiologists