Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/367

Rh phase of it. For though he responds to the hypnotist as if he had been simply waiting to do so, his immediate response made, he sinks back once more into passivity. His action would seem merely the effect of momentum impressed from without; as if the hypnotist had given his mental machinery a shove which had carried him a certain distance, and whose impetus had then been gradually dissipated by the friction of the parts. This momentum gone, he becomes as before—inert. He possesses apparently no initiative of his own.

While the foreign momentum lasts he acts with a perfection of performance realized in some machines, but not by conscious man. What he does he does far better than the best of which he is capable in his normal state. And he hesitates at little or nothing. His action is kin to the somnambulists who will walk on ridge-poles and the edges of precipices without fear and without falling; only that whereas the sleepwalker does so of his own motion, the hypnotic subject does so at the suggestion of another. And the hint needed to start him is at times inconceivably slight. What