Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/422

 FURTHER PROBLEMS OF HYPNOTISM. (II.) 409 have unhesitatingly pronounced. This has been almost inevitable ; for the first of the three was not likely to occur to them, until the reality of ' psychical ' or telepathic transferences was proved irrespectively of hypnotism, and by examples where the possibility of bodily influence was excluded, either by the form of the experiment, or by distance ; while the last of the three, though not equally outside the range of physiological conceptions, and though nowhere so strongly suggested as in the immediate facts of hypnotism, is so indefinite as to seem more like a phrase than an explanation ; what can science have to say about inscrutable nervous influences ? The second hypothesis, moreover, undoubtedly offers a satisfactory account of many of the ordinary cases ; while its adequacy has seemed almost guaranteed by the fact that not infrequently a person has succeeded in hypnotising himself by the purely mechani- cal process of fixing his eyes immovably on some near object. As to the first hypothesis that of direct ' psychical ' agency there is not much to detain us ; simply because where physical processes are simultaneously brought to bear, psychical agency could never be proved to be the really effective element ; while the fact that only one case 1 is on record of silent concentration, unaccompanied by any physical processes, producing hypnotisation in a person never previously entranced, leads us to suspect that its influence would at most be supplementary to that of the other means adopted. That it sometimes has an influence of this supplementary sort seems likely enough ; for though with a fresh ' subject ' there is no specially ' explosive spot ' the result of previous hypnotisation to be affected, yet, if the working of the transferred idea be of the sort above suggested, we can readily conceive that a soporific impulse, strong enough at any rate to facilitate the passage into trance, might be ' psychically ' conveyed to a sensitive recipient. It must be remembered that in discussions of that part of the hypnotic process which is peculiar to the ' subject ' it has been the almost invariable rule to attach some distinct importance to mental elements to eke out the supposed influence of physical immobility, or of an inward and upward squint, by that of attention or willingness to yield to the novel impulse ; and for a believer in telepathy it is impos- sible to assume such mental elements as these without admitting the possibility at least that they may be reinforced, 1 See MIND No. 46, p. 214, note.