Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/890

808 unable to cry for help or to run. At another time, when about twelve years old, his grandfather died. He stole unobserved into the room where the body lay and lifted the shroud. No sooner had his eyes fallen upon the dead face than he lost all power of thought and of movement and remained fixed, the shroud uplifted in his hand and his eyes staring at the corpse, until some one came in and drew him away. As soon as I heard this account it struck me that he would probably prove to be a good hypnotic patient. Although himself very skeptical, he allowed me to try, and in three minutes I had him in a deep lethargy in which he was almost absolutely suggestible. It did not occur to me at the time to look for signs of incoördination, but two years later I found that his visual field was much restricted—that is, he was blind to its outlying portions—and also that his sensation of touch was more or less impaired. I have no doubt that the facility with which his upper consciousness was both accidentally and intentionally displaced sprang from the same conditions of which these symptoms of sensory incoördination gave evidence.

Hypertrophy of these two kinds may be the lot of any mental state. When it is a percept that usurps the conscious field, we speak of the patient as being "fascinated"; if the percept is attended by great emotional disturbance, we use such phrases as "spellbound with horror," "drunk with joy," etc. When the hypertrophied states are chiefly ideas without marked emotional accompaniments, we speak of the patient as being "in trance," "seeing a vision," or simply as "dreaming." If the visions are accompanied by intensely pleasurable emotions the state is termed "ecstasy." In the higher grades of ecstasy the concrete visions disappear and clear consciousness is lost in a flood of emotions of an intensely pleasurable character. The types of trance in which the emotion is acutely disagreeable—grief, terror, remorse—are usually classed as diseases, partly because they unfit the patient to a greater degree for the duties of life, and partly because they often spring from organic disease, especially of nutrition. The disordered physiological processes give rise to floods of vague but intensely disagreeable sensations, and these in turn generate the horrible and terrifying visions. Many trance states are revealed in the patient's movements, but for the present I shall speak only of those which are remembered and described afterward.

The attainment of ecstasy has been the aim of many religious sects in ancient and modern times, by whom it is conceived to be a direct union with the Divine; these form an important branch of the group of religious mystics, all of whom believe that the human soul is capable of direct union with God during this present life. But our information as to the various possible types of ecstasy is very defective. The essential element is the