Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/507

 THE PROBLEMS OF HYPNOTISM. 495 matism, this is emphatically a case where the theory of of a mind exclusively occupied with the next step and not occupying itself with ideas of falling seems of most assistance. Dr. Despine's next argument, however, has more force. He finds an indication that even the most com- plicated psychic phenomena of hypnotism may be purely automatic in the fact that in certain abnormal states the personality seems doubled ; as where a person recovering from typhoid fever spoke and sang, while seeming to him- self to be listening to an other's performance, and without any idea what the next sound to be produced would be. Simi- larly religious ecstatics and ' trance-mediums ' have delivered impromptu discourses without conscious cerebration, and have been the devout and admiring auditors of eloquence whose sense they grasped only after it had issued from their own lips. In these cases Dr. Despine attempts to make the one part of the person the watching and attentive pait the witness of the automatism of the other part ; and since, viewed in this light, the presence of the witness is not necessary to the production of the result, an argument is obtained for the general possibility of similar manifestations without any participation of consciousness. This artifice of making two people, A and B, out of one, in order (in the absence of evidence) to obtain a sort of presumption that A's presence is not a condition of B's actions, is not very convincing ; at the same time there need be no great diffi- culty in admitting the particular possibility claimed. Few will dispute that the talking and singing might appear as purely automatic phenomena ; and even the impromptu dis- course, with its far more complicated series of actions, may be conceived as producible either in the absence or with a miDimum of consciousness its contents being presumably a string of familiar ideas, closely connected by association, and clothed in a hackneyed phraseology. Despine's error is in sweepingly applying the same argument to hypnotism, without remarking how radically different are many of the phenomena there presented. The psychologist who claims for his study the dignity of a science is surely bound to follow the physicists' example, and to take some trouble to vary the conditions of his observations ; and in this ques- tion of the presence of consciousness, the very simplest experiments suggest the sort of variation that is necessary. A subject ' is asked a question to which the obvious reply is ' yes,' and answers ' yes ' : he is asked another to which the obvious reply is ' no,' and answers ' no '. ' Clearly auto- matic reflex action,' say Despine and Heidenhain, with a