Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/352

338 even by the simple association of ideas. Suggestion can even be brought to bear upon purely physical phenomena, as, for example, paralysis. We speak now of subjective burnings, of suggested blisters; and possibly the strange phenomena of stigmatics may have their origin in something of the kind. The suggestions of acts are the most important in this category, because they are what most cause somnambulists to resemble wakeful men, while passing from the domain of sleep into that of waking. They provoke the grave question of responsibility. Suggestions of this kind can be relegated to three groups: suggestions made during sleep of acts to be accomplished during sleep; suggestions made during sleep of acts to be accomplished during the wakeful condition; and suggestions during the wakeful condition of acts to be accomplished while awake. Here suggestion appears in its most wonderful manifestations; for examples are cited of suggestions enduring three months of incubation. Nothing is, without doubt, easier than to suppose a simulation under such circumstances; and our professors of hypnotism do not make efforts enough to invent counter-proofs and traps against imposture. But the number of facts bearing upon the matter is so considerable, and they are verified by so many examples, that a universal deception would be as hard to understand as the fact itself.

We can give only a bare outline of the facts here and will merely add that the question of suggestion raises many others; among them that of the relation of hypnotism to hysteria; that of hypnotic phases (lethargy, catalepsy, and somnambulism), which are affirmed at Paris and denied at Nancy; that of the passage from the normal to the suggestive state, and vice versa; the philosophical questions that are more or less involved in the discussion, such as those of free-will and responsibility, and the question of double personality.

The fact of sleep may of itself have already suggested the idea of two distinct persons, for we certainly are not the same sleeping and waking. Yet, in sleep, we have recollections from the waking state, and we can remember from sleep when awake. There is, therefore, an essential connection between the two states. There are in natural somnambulism at the same time more and less of analogy with the wakeful condition. In one respect it more resembles wakefulness; for while, in natural sleep, the dream is absolutely incoherent, the somnambulist plays out his dreams; that is, he executes a system of co-ordinated movements having a beginning, a middle, and an end, or a certain coherence. On the other hand, somnambulism is further separated from wakefulness in the fact that the man awake wholly loses the recollection of what the sleeping man has done, while the somnambulist can remember what he has done in a previous sleep. There are, then, in