Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/512

 500 EDMUND GUENEY : thus. One set of facts (notably, the unbroken persistence of consciousness and memory in the passage into and back from the lightest stages of the trance) show that a hypnotic condition is not ipso facto an unconscious one. Another set of facts show that, in hypnotism, the line which separates mechanical and reflex from conscious and volitional actions is considerably shifted, and actions which would normally be above the threshold of consciousness sink below it. But what of that, if a multitude of actions, performed in that lighter stage of the trance to which the most interesting phe- nomena of hypnotism belong, do according to any natural interpretation imply a state distinctly above the threshold ? We readily grant that we cannot draw the new line with certainty, even for a particular case ; but all analogy is against supposing it shifted to the utmost limit at the very outset. I cannot then for a moment believe that the automatic theory, in the extreme form which asserts unconsciousness for all hypnotic and somnambulic actions, will hold its ground. But in proportion as the theory becomes less sweeping, it gets into difficulties of detail. Heidenhain, as we have seen, has found himself obliged to recognise the psychic ele- ment in the higher hypnotic manifestations ; but he seems oddly unaware of the effect of this admission on his exposi- tion of the physical processes involved. The point of that exposition, it will be remembered, was the opening of a direct channel from impressional to motor nerve-centres, through inhibition of cortical function ; and now we find a vast number of cases where consciousness, though condi- tioned by cortical activity, is not inhibited. It is of course easy to reply that here it is only the functions specially associated with spontaneous control and choice of move- ments that suffer inhibition. But that goes not a whit further as an explanation than Braid's general assertion of a profound nervous change ; it is merely a necessary infer- ence from the palpable fact that spontaneous control and choice have ceased. It is just this cessation which, trans- lated into physical terms, we should naturally call ' inhibi- tion ' that constitutes the novel feature of the case ; and nothing that we have otherwise known about inhibition (as Mr. Romanes, in his preface to the translation of Heiden- hain's Animal Magnetism, has rightly admitted) could have led us to expect or conceive the results attributed to it. Heidenhain's explanation in fact, like that of the French Commission, is no more than a restatement of the problem. As long as the whole of cortical function can be supposed