Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/493

 THE PROBLEMS OF HYPNOTISM. 481 better known is essentially distinct from either. The looseness of thought which has already made ' automatism ' cover two quite distinct things very easily extends it to a third equally distinct thing, which, being thus referred to a class, is so far and all by the magic of a word explained ! The automatism of the hypnotised ' subject,' in his response to external suggestions, is often automatism in a true sense ; in that respect differing toto ccdo from those spontaneous or internally-originated impulses of fancy to which, in moments of random reverie, the poet's mind may give the rein. But it differs no less distinctly from the automatic or reflex words or actions with which we saw the absorbed mathematician responding to external impulses. For of those responses, as we observed, the essence was that they were unattended to, the stream of consciousness being rapt away in another direction ; while in the hypnotic case, consciousness and attention, 1 so far from being abstracted from the things which are being done in response to the external suggestion, are directed with even abnormal concentration upon those very things. We might without incorrectness describe the higher hypnotic phenomena as reflex action, in respect of the certainty with which particular movements follow on particular stimuli ; but they are, and their peculiarity consists in their being, conscious reflex action. The central problem of Hypnotism lies in the combination of those two ad- jectives ; and in the following pages each of them will have to be emphasised in turn. The hypnotised ' subject ' who carries out complicated orders is a conscious, and often even a reckoning and planning, automaton. Reflex response (if we wish to retain the phrase) is here raised from the merely physical to the mental plane ; the external suggestion evokes a particular idea in as certain and as isolated a way as an appropriate electrical stimulus evokes the isolated action of one particular muscle. This isolation of a single object in the mind naturally implies abeyance of the normal con- trolling and relating power. In the normal state, successive vivid points of consciousness are surrounded by a swarm of subordinate perceptions and ideas, by reference to which it is that conduct is instinctively or subconsciously kept ra- tional, even though the attention may be strongly focussed on its immediate aim or object. In the hypnotic state the contact is broken between the predominant idea and this J Consciousness and attention, that is, so far as they are present. The very varying degrees, and in many cases the indisputably high degree, in which they may be present will be discussed a little later.