Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/435

 422 E. GUENEY: FURTHER PROBLEMS OF HYPNOTISM, (n.) ferent in their details. Dr. Liebeault considered that the nervous influence which he brought to bear " re-established the physiological functioning" of his 'subject's' organs. But how little apparent relation such a result has to the hysterical disturbances of the willing-game, or to the stiffen- ing and anaesthetising of a young man's fingers ! As to all difficulties of this sort, it seems enough for the present to remark that they ought not to be regarded as affecting in the slightest degree the general question as to cause and effect. Inasmuch as our ignorance concerning the details of the nervous governance of the human organism is very nearly complete in respect of processes where the fact of the govern- ance is universally admitted, the absence of a satisfactory physiological account of the intermediate stages ought not to weigh a feather in the decision whether the ostensible affection of one organism in some unknown way by the proximity of another is demonstrated or demonstrable by evidence. That, even if the general fact were incontrovertibly established, its various modes of manifestation and their complete physiological history should remain obscure is exactly what we should a priori expect. I will only add that cases of the Salpetriere type, and cases of a sanative in- fluence produced by an operator who is himself in vigorous health, would accord with the view advanced in my last paper as to the transmission (supposing it to have any physical basis) of telepathic impressions, namely, that the process resembles those where a physical force, acting by vibrations through a medium, reproduces itself at a distance in its original form, as in the case of sympathetic tuning- forks or induced magnetism. The resemblance does not hold, however, in the other results e.g., in the finger-ex- periments, where the hand operated on assumes a quite different condition from that of the hand that operates ; and so far as the evidence supports a definite view, it points to another or a further process than the sympathetic or simply reproductive, as involved in many of the cases of supersen- sory transference where the organisms concerned are in close proximity to one another. I cannot forecast whether science will ever address itself with success to such problems as these. I should be content if any of my readers were led to regard as within the possibility of scientific acceptance the broad fact that certain supersensory and non-mechanical transferences take place which belong to the domain of physical and physiological, and not merely of psychical, research. Such transferences stand a better chance of con- sideration as examples of ' nervous induction ' than as a branch of telepathy.