Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/511

 THE PROBLEMS OF HTPNOTISif. 499 asked if he could not walk forwards, and who ' remembers arguing out in his mind, wearily, that it followed from this he was walking backwards '. He will even form original theories as to what is told him. For instance, a young man who had been impressed with the idea that he was going to be hanged, was then told that his sweetheart had been blown off the pier and drowned, and that the announcement of the event was in the evening paper : he at once surmised that she had purposely thrown herself off, through grief at his approaching fate. He was now told that the second edition of the paper showed it was a mistake, and he suggested two explanations ; the first that the name Xewington had been wrongly printed for Xewton ; the second (in which he tes- tified his belief by seizing a paper and pointing to what he imagined to be the actual passage), that the words in the second edition ran ' almost blown off the pier, and almost drowned '. Again the hypnotised person, like the somnam- bulist, will sometimes go through complex calculations, and bring out a correct result with greater ease and certainty than in his normal state ; while the vividness and inventiveness of his imagination, as under the stimulation of questions he pursues aloud the course of his waking-dream, are a source of ever fresh astonishment. These latter facts alone cannot of course be made con- clusive against a thorough-going automatic theory ; but they at any rate suggest strong probabilities, which ought to be met by something better than bare assertions. First we have Heidenhain's crude attribution to reflex mimicry of all the phenomena which others have attributed to the dominance of an idea his statement, e.g., that a ' subject ' will never eat a raw potato on the suggestion that it is a pear, unless the operator makes movements of mastication in his sight. This view produces a treatise. A few more experiments are made, and these produce a practical re- cantation with an admission of the sufficiency of suggested is to produce the appropriate bodily movements. Then comes Despine, and maintains that even the ' ideas ' have only a physical existence. We do not dispute the admis- sibility of his conception in simple cases, but ask in vain why we are to extend it over the whole hypnotic field, and apply it to elaborate actions which have been ac- companied by consciousness in the whole of our experi- ence, and present every imaginable sign that the attention is completely engrossed by them. Are we to forego all dis- crimination, just because it saves trouble to have a simple and thorough-going theory? The situation may be put