Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/636

618 Experiments in physics are likewise, in some instances, complicated with experiments with living human beings. Thus in the "Keely motor" and "Winter motor" claims, and in other like devices for the overthrow of the law of the conservation of energy, the apparatus for generating power was in the hands of interested non-experts, who might be capable of either willful or self-deception—for the purposes of science it matters not which—and no satisfactory experiment could be made unless these possibilities of error could be eliminated.

The temporary success of cundurango was almost entirely the result of self-deception of those who, under the mingled emotions of hope, despair, and expectation, availed themselves of it. It is impossible to introduce any drug or system of treatment for cancer, or any other grave disorder, amid great pomp and noise, and under the patronage of honored names, without at least relieving, for the time, a certain proportion of cases; and practically it is of little import what the drug or remedy may be, if only the confidence of the sufferers is assured.

Men not only of general but of special experimental ability are constantly going far out of the way in scientific research through want of simple knowledge of the laws and phenomena of the involuntary life—a branch of physiology which, though of extreme interest and overflowing in suggestion, is so young and recent in its development that it is not yet taught in colleges or schools. The published monographs of the late Mr. Braid, of Manchester, show indisputably that their author was not without a certain genius for scientific research; but in all his philosophizing on the effects of fixed attention and straining of the eyes in the production of what has been known as hypnotism he missed utterly the discovery, or even the suspicion, of the great fact that trance, of which hypnotism is but one of numberless phases, was a subjective not an objective condition—existing in the subject's own brain—and that the manoeuvrings by which he was wont to excite it were but one of infinite devices for acting upon the mind; thus Mr. Braid failed to solve the problem of trance. Similarly Professor Czermak—one of the inventors of the laryngoscope—though he made many experiments in the production of hypnotism in animals, likewise confounded the subjective with the objective, and did not arrive at the true explanation of his own experiments. Indeed, from the time of Mesmer down, all or nearly all the scientific studies and attempted scientific studies of trance, in any of its multiform phases, have been made valueless by this same non-recognition of the involuntary life, of which trance is the extreme expression. Confounding the subjective with the objective vitiates nearly all human philosophy.

Similarly Mr. Edison, in his experiments with those highly interesting phenomena that he supposes to indicate a new force, was so far misled by the muscular contractions of the tongue when applied to a block of iron, through which the suspected force was passing, as to conclude that an objective influence was acting, whereas, after the