Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/499

 THE PROBLEMS OF HYPNOTISM. 487 abounds in puzzles no less special and insoluble. But if I ani told that a particular mental attitude that of fixed or one- sided attention is the cause of certain mental phenomena which are new to me, I am surely justified in demanding that the order of events shall present some perceptible co- herence shall at least not run directly counter to what my general experience would have led me to expect. Such an objection might be pedantic as against writers who of course have no thought of differing from Braid, or of deny- ing the physical correlative of the attentive attitude were it not that in their advocacy of attention they have curiously disregarded the facts, such as those just recorded, where this want of coherence is evident. The oracular simplicity of Burger's formula, that the cause of hypnotic phenomena is essentially psychic, would hardly retain its impressiveness in face of hypnotic phenomena which in psychic character are at the precisely opposite pole from their antecedent. But this objection has yet another side. Suppose we were told that the final result of cramping a limb or a psy- chic faculty was paralysis, where should we expect to find the paralysis ? Surely in that limb, or in that faculty. And in the case of the lower hypnotic phenomena, what happens to the faculty of attention may doubtless be regarded in this light. Thus if a favourable ' subject ' be allowed to stare at a button undisturbed, he will soon pass beyond the ' alert stage,' when his imagination and his body might be brought into activity by suggestions, and will simply become torpid and indifferent, though still often capable for some time of rational conversation ; the cramped condition of his atten- tion has not resulted in continued and absorbing attention to the button, but in gradual paralysis of the whole percep- tive function. We have just observed how different is the case with the attention, if the ' subject ' be taken in hand and suitably treated for the higher phenomena before this deep state has supervened ; but the further point to be now noted about such phenomena is this that while in them the attention is so little paralysed that it is even found to be abnormally mobile after a period of fixation on the button, other functions those namely of choice, and will, and reaction in the way of attraction and repulsion are paralysed. The effect on these reactions admits (as we shall see) of various degrees, but there can be no doubt as to its reality. In psy- chical terms, then, cramp of the perceptive has led to paralysis of the appetitive faculty a fact which it would surely need a very enthusiastic psychicist to regard as self-explanatory. It may be worth while here to note what I think has been