Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/496

 484 EDMUND GURNEY : The psychic factor mainly relied on has of course been that of attention. And there are doubtless cases where such reliance might seem justified cases where the physical means which are successful in producing hypnotism seem much less exceptional and violent than those described by Braid, and where, -therefore, the accompanying psychical element of concentrated attention becomes relatively more conspicuous. Even these cases, however, include none where physical means have been altogether absent : we have no record of the production by attention, however con- centrated, of the characteristic phenomena of suspension of directive power and loss of memory, unless accompanied by some amount of physical fixation. 1 And indeed the very nature of the concentration, when present, seems to involve some such fixation : it would probably be impossible where the bodily state was wholly pliant and natural. In its strained immobility it is itself exceptional so much so that an edu- cated mind may find the greatest difficulty in attaining to it and is, in fact, the very opposite of the active sort of attention with which an object is normally contemplated or a train of thought followed. Nor can attention be repre- sented even as an inseparable accompaniment in the pro- duction of the state, unless by resolutely ignoring a large part of the hypnotic field. As Mr. Romanes some time ago observed, and as Prof. Stanley Hall again pointed out in his most interesting and suggestive paper in MIND XXX., it is easy to hypnotise animals, but not easy to credit such an animal as a frog or a crayfish with any true power of mental concentration. And the phenomena of natural somnambulism or ' sleep-waking,' which in respect of the absorption of the mind in one direction present the closest analogy to those of hypnotism, demand no previous con- centration of attention at all. But even if we confine our- selves to cases where attention is actually present during the production of the state, what ground is there for de- scribing it as the cause of that state, in the absence of any extraneous empirical proof of a tendency in the antecedent to produce the consequent ? The general effects of a one- sided strain of mind or body are pretty well known ; and ' tonic cramp of the attention ' (to adopt Prof. Stanley 1 This of course does not apply to the production of the state in sensi- tive 'subjects' who have been hypnotised on previous occasions, and who fall into the trance by attention, not to a button, but to their own memo- ries of past sensations. The power of representing and revivifying past states is one which manifests itself in many directions, and has no .special relation to the hypnotic problems.