should poison X. with a glass of pure water, which was said to contain poison. The patient woke, and without delay offered the glass to X., and invited him to drink by saying, "Is it not a hot day?" "We ordered another subject to steal a pocket-handkerchief from one of the persons present. The subject was hardly awake when she feigned dizziness, and staggering toward X., she fell against him, and hastily snatched his handkerchief." Some day M. X-will be found dead in earnest, and it will be pleaded for the hand which carried the poison or the knife that the act was done under hypnotic influence, and that the unknown inspirer of the deed and not the actor is responsible. When that defence is made, or when one of the many other accusations which hypnotism renders possible is made, a number of difficult questions will arise. But they will arise on a broad basis of well-ascertained facts, common to theorists of half a dozen different schools in Europe, and with which by this time we are or ought to be familiar.

We ought to have been so very long ago. I remember the occasion when this was first made plain to me. I was in a little town in the North of Scotland during the college vacation of 1851. The hall was filled with some two hundred people of both sexes and of every age, but all known to each other from childhood. The only stranger was the mesmerist, H. E. Lewis, a graduate of Edinburgh and a pupil of Professor Gregory there. Before he had been in the hall an hour he brought out all the ordinary phenomena. That is, he showed that a large proportion of those present were quite easily put into a state between sleeping and waking, in which every suggestion made to them was accept ed as real by the imagination and senses, so as for the time absolutely to control the will. But on this Saturday night he went farther. Among the sensitive part of the audience was a young lad, named J. M. He was not only in perfect health, but, with his brilliant complexion and golden hair, a model of the Apollo type of youth. All the more astonishing was the contrast when Lewis, after making other suggestions which were instantly obeyed, put a staff into the young fellow's hand and whispered to him that he was an old man. He turned from Apollo into Tithonus before our eyes, the very muscles of his

cheeks falling in, and the hue of age overspreading his face as he tottered amid the wondering crowd. But this, too, was in the familiar order of experiment. What followed was new. Just before J. M. wakened, Lewis repeated to him twice over: At twelve o'clock on Mondayon Monday at midday-wherever you happen to be, you shall go with my compliments to Mr. Kenneth Murray at the bank." The other murmured an assent, but when awakened the next moment he started away in bashful surprise to find himself the centre of so many gazers. As usual in such cases, he had not the least recollection of what had happened before he woke; and when told of his promise he made it very plain that he did not intend to make a fool of himself again on Monday at twelve. I had determined to see out the play, and at that hour I found myself behind some windows which commanded the shop where J. M. was doing his daily work. Several men were in it, but with no serious expectation of seeing the result, as to which some of them were chaffing him. Twelve struck, and before the strokes ended the young fellow seemed to get confused and abstracted. As the last sound ceased he vaulted over his counter and came out into the street, bareheaded and blushing, and evidently exquisitely uncomfortable. Yet in this state of bashful torture (and not in the least asleep, as he had been on the Saturday night) he walked in the required direction through the assembled gazers of his native town; and when some of them, failing to turn him back by strong words, went in front and formed a chain with their arms linked together, he suddenly burst through them, broke into a run, and never slackened his pace till he had delivered the message entrusted to him at the place prescribed.

Incidents of this kind have recently come to be accepted as among the regular phenomena. But at that time they were new, and only to be received where there were exceptional opportunities for scrutiny. And the opportunities for scrutiny into this kind of thing are perhaps greater in a quiet rural district, where every one is known to every one, than in the crowded meetings and platforms of a great city. Another such opportunity happened about the same time to a fried of mine, who is now Principal Miller, of Madras, a C. I. E., and well known as the centre of great ed

ucational influences in Southern India. He also was then a young student come home from college, not to Ross-shire, but to hyperborean Thurso,

"Where upon the rocky Caithness strand, Breaks the long wave that at the Pole began."

Lewis had gone north there also, and, finding a fellow-student of Miller's among his most sensitive subjects, had ordered him to go at a particular hour on the following day with the same sort of message to a house in Thurso. The student, when wakened, was indignant at having been made a subject of exhibition, and, while treating with scorn the idea of his obeying the injunction, he quietly arranged with his friend to put it out of the question by taking a long walk together, before the hour named, into the country. Accordingly, they were then four miles out of town, and deep in a metaphysical or literary discussion. Suddenly the student friend stopped, hesitated, apologized, struggled on again, and finally declared that he felt he must return. Dr. Miller tried reasoning, ridicule, entreaty; and at last resorted to friendly violence to tide over the bad minute. But the result was other than he had expected, for his friend (whose name I do not know or am willing to forget) first quietly deposited his mentor in the ditch by the road-side, and then taking to his heels ran the four miles into town, delivered his message, and was laid up for days thereafter in bed from fatigue or collapse.

Now such things as these called for careful inquiry, apart altogether from the theory which was presented along with them. Lewis's theory was that of his master, Dr. Gregory, of Edinburgh, who had translated Baron Reichenbach's book on odic force. This was a supposed vital force, which the will of the mesmerizer could direct and concentrate upon the mesmerized. Master and pupil fully believed in it; and when the hour came at which he had ordered one of his subjects to go and do anything, Lewis was in the habit of sitting down and deliberately will ing him to carry it out. His volition, he asserted, was equally effective whether he was distant one mile, or ten, or a hundred, from the man to be influenced by it. I have no doubt it was. For with regard to this, and to nearly all the other mesineric phenomena then attracting attention, some

of us, who then studied the matter as amateurs at a very early age, came to the conclusion that the state of mind or will of the magnetizer had nothing to do with it, It was altogether, in our view, a question of the state of mind-the will, or the want of will-of the magnetized. In short, we gave in our adhesion substantially to the view which had already been put forward by Mr. James Braid, of Manchester, and which has since become famous under the name of hypnotism. The leading idea of Braid was that the mesmerizer was of no consequence- you could dispense with him and mesmerize yourself, if need be; the main characteristic of this extraordinary and hitherto unrecognized state being the absolute subjection of the subject to every suggestion which reached the patient from the outside-a subjection which sometimes prolonged itself, as we had ourselves seen, after the sleep proper was over. All this was even then abundantly and superfluously proved, and it was enough for science. There might perhaps be more. There was a fringe of further phenoniena not quite proved or accounted for, but all in the di rection of hyperesthesia, exaltation of faculty, will force, clairvoyance, magnetic influence, etc. To facts that looked in such directions, we, in those days of youth, kept an open mind-greatly assisted by men like Sir William Hamilton and Sir James Simpson, who were then our guides in the Scottish capital and its University. But even then it would have required far more evidence than I at least possessed to make me ascribe the phenomena we saw either to a magnetic force, with Mesmer and Reichenbach; or to a will-force, with our novelists and poets; or to a spiritforce, with Western seers and Eastern theosophists. Nor did we need to go farther than what was already proved in order to excite intense interest in the subject. territory even then opened to science was vast enough. It was full of magnificent promise, and it at least called for exploration.

The

It had to wait for it thirty years, and when it came the result was in one sense most honorable for England; in another, not so much so. What is flattering is, that all over Europe Mr. Braid is now regarded as the founder of the modern science. There is now an active school of hypnotic observation, not only in France and Germany, but in Italy, Greece, Swit

zerland, and Spain; in Russia, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway; in the South of America, as well as in the North. But every where its cultivators look back to the Manchester surgeon. "At the time when the Paris Academy of Medicine was condemning animal magnetism, Dr. James Braid directed the question into its proper field-that of observation and experiment. Braid must be regarded as the initiator of the scientific study of animal magnetism. For this reason, since it expresses the change of method which he effected, it is usual to substitute for that of animal magnetism the word hypnotism, by which he designated the artificial nervous sleep. This testimony is conclusive, because it comes from the school which regards Braid's theory as insufficient, though fun. damental, and which for itself prefers the term animal magnetism, as embracing additional phenomena than those which are universally recognized. The truest representatives of Braidism or hypnotism proper, however, seem to be, in France, the school of Nancy. Their conclusion that everything is done by mere suggestion or working upon the imagination, and nothing by a direct physical influence of hypnotizer on hypnotized, is supported with great vigor of reasoning as well as a large range of experiment upon sane and healthful subjects. Of course such a negative conclusion must yield to positive observations, and those which are put forward by the Salpêtrière, as proving a direct physical influence also, are admirably recorded, and would have great weight if the subjects were not in almost every case girlgraduates who have taken a high degree in hysteria. The attitude of Germany and the rest of Europe seems to be very fairly reflected in the book already mentioned, by Dr. Moll. The Berlin writer thinks that nothing more than bypnotic suggestion has yet been proved, but that the alleged evidence for direct physical influence, though inconclusive in the meantime, deserves investigation. This is not unlike Braid's own attitude to clairvoyance and similar phenomena, for which he did not make himself responsible, while inquiring into them; and it is satisfactory that a

* Binet and Féré, p. 67.

"Suggestive Therapeutics." By H. Bernheim, M.D., Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Nancy. Second edition. New York and London: Putnam. 1889.

common-sense method of investigation should have been once more derived by other countries from the country of Bacon.

What is less satisfactory is that in that investigation our country has, during the intermediate time, taken scarcely any share. There have been exceptions in our philosophical literature, notably that of Dr. Carpenter. There have been exceptions in our medical literature, as in the case of Dr. Laycock. When this was last a fashionable subject of inquiry--about the year 1850-at least two leading men in Edinburgh, Sir James Simpson and Dr. Bennett, took an active part in its cultivation. But the British medical faculty as a whole has then and ever since ignored it. And this raises a question. We who live near the University of Edinburgh have all an admiration for that Faculty. And now that it has been proposed to hand over this whole matter to it exclusively, I cannot but recall the reasons repeatedly given by very representative members for not taking any interest in the subject in the past. The reasons were not always consistent. Sometimes it was said the thing was not grave enough; that it might be fit for quacks and platforms, but not for a responsible profession. Sometimes, on the other hand, the experiments were deprecated as involving serious risks to the minds and bodies of those concerned. Plainly these two positions could not well stand together. Both reasons could not be true. But both might be worthless. That every showman could produce on a platform these hitherto unclassed and unverified phenomena, and that scores of schoolboys passed every evening under their hands into a physical or nervous condition not yet recognized by science or admitted into the booksall this was no reason for science closing its eyes against the thing, but very much to the contrary. And the well founded surmise that, behind all this wealth of facile experiment, there might be serious risks, was a still stronger reason against ignoring it. Every power for evil is also a power for good, but not until it is studied and brought into its proper place in science. Every medicine is a poison, and, for all I know, every poison may be a medicine. But that is no reason for ex

I quite acknowledge individual exceptions: Brown Séquard, etc.

cluding poisons from the study of the medical faculty. Nor is it a reason for confiding poisons exclusively to its care, unless and until it has first made a study of their nature and uses. Now the positions I have mentioned were taken up expressly as reasons against undertaking such study in this particular department. And until that attitude is altered, and indeed reversed, I foresee extreme difficulty in persuading an English Legislature to abdicate in favor of any profession, however learned. Why should it hand over the key of knowledge to those of whom it might for so many years be said: "They enter not in themselves, and those that would enter in they hinder "?

Has that attitude been altered? I am sure that to some extent it has; and symptoms like the appearance during last winter of the able papers of Dr. Felkin in the Edinburgh Medical Journal* are reassuring. But I wish to propose a test case. Suppose a grave inquiry arising in our courts into a murder or personal outrage, with hypnotic agency as the main ground of accusation on the one hand, or defence on the other. As things stand at present, it would be a sensational trial; and the mere fact that it was coming on would strengthen the demand for handing over to responsible guardians a region with such hideous possibilities. But suppose the day of trial actually come. You cannot try such a case without skilled witnesses. Are the witnesses skilled in this particular matter to be those habitually and professionally occupied with it, or are they to be medical men? And if medical men, are they to be men who have made a special study of this region; or men of eminence generally, who may be supposed to have all the regions more or less before them? If we get the latter, as in so many respects is desirable, is it quite certain that the results of examination and cross-examination would be satisfactory to a jury, or to the public outside? The facts have, no doubt, been before this country for forty years at least; and they have been so common and notorious that their notoriety and commonness have been pleaded against the profession inquiring into them. But could we depend on the leading men of the profession even now agreeing (apart

*Since published as Hypnotism; or, Psycho-Therapeutics," by R. W. Felkin, M.D. Edinburgh.

from theories to account for them) on the great mass of unquestionable facts? A re they as skilled witnesses prepared, with a decent measure of unanimity, to separate these facts, accepted throughout Europe, from those others on which the most zealous schools are not agreed? That is, of course, one of the first things which a witness professing knowledge would be invited to do. And the attempt to discriminate between facts ascertained, and facts more or less doubtful, would lead to the region of theories, in steering amid which the witness would have the usual opportunities of shipwrecking his credibility.

We

Let us hope that he will not think it necessary to commit himself, as the Quarterly Review of July is disposed to do, to Mesmer and his universal magnetic fluid. That sort of eccentricity, at the recurring periods when this discussion becomes fashionable in England, is the pendant of the equally unscientific neglect of the facts for the twenty-five years or so between. will believe rather that our coming witness, after overawing the jury by his height of professional attainment, proceeds to fascinate them by his common-sense use of it; that he discriminates the hypnotic state from madness, hysteria, and somnambulism on the one side, and from sleep and lethargy on the other; that he informs us what proportion of healthful persons in every room are capable of passing into it, if not by what test we may beforehand distinguish such persons from their neighbors;* that he goes on to testify to the control which one en rapport with the subject, even for the first time in the latter's life, may have first over his imagination, and then over his will, and lastly over his memory-and not only his memory of the past, but, if I may use the expression, his memory of the future-for the phenomena of post-hypnotism, however they are to be explained, must often be the central facts in the evidence; that, after speaking of those who are susceptible generally, he gives the result of his observation of the individual (for each subject has his hypnotic peculiarities and specialties, and the question for the jury is not whether a man might be influenced, but whether this man was so influenced, in point of fact, as on the one side or the other is alleged); and

*The former question is comparatively easy, the proportion being undoubtedly large; but the latter I have never seen answered,

lastly, that, passing from experience and observation to experiment, he enables justice to use tests like that "" memory bridge" by which truth, which in this matter dwells so near the bottom of her well, sometimes leaps out of it.

Well, all this may happen. And sooner or later it will happpen. But until something of the sort does turn up, I do not believe that the larger jury outside, which elects our Legislature, will be persuaded to pass a law restricting experiment in the vast region around psycho-therapeutics, even to a recognized and privileged and highly cultured profession. The sugges tion that it should do so was made by medical men forty years ago, when the subject was last under discussion, and it is always one deserving consideration. But before handing over the key of knowledge, the public desires to know whether it is to be used in order to open or to shut. And there is too much foundation for the criticism that if this transfer had been made forty years ago, the whole region would have been still under lock and key. It is quite certain, indeed, that the blame of the neglect of this subject in Great Britain during the last four decades does not fall on the medical profession exclusively. During all that time experiment has been free. It has been carried on largely for the amusement of the idle and the curious, but it was open to the members of any profession-say, to that of law-to take it up more intelligently and persistently. They have not done so, and must bear their share of the blame. But, on the other hand, the medical is the only profession for which the claim has been made that this region belongs to it-belongs to it properly and perhaps exclusively. There is a sense in which I believe that claim to be well founded. Experience, I think, shows that until this great section of our educated men have taken up such a subject as this for persistent study, there is not likely to be real advance in it. But they must take it up, before they can exclude others. They must annex the region professionally, or at least scientifically, before

"Erinnerungsbrücke": a man who when awake has forgotten what he did, or experienced, in the hypnotic state, when put back into that state instantly recalls it. There is a double consciousness, and each consciousness has its own memory, but-it must be added its own lapses of memory.

they can be allowed to evict from it the whole human race. That they have now, however, begun to explore it, though after long delay, and after letting other countries get too much in advance of us, the original and translated works which have been cited bear witness. The first steps have been taken,* and we may look forward to the public being satisfied-perhaps not in the dramatic way that I have suggested that the whole subject is now being explored with the explorer's passion, and can at any moment be explained with

meeting this autumn at Birmingham, and its Psychological Section, on August 1, unanimously passed the following twofold resolu

The British Medical Association held its

tion:

"That the subject of hypnotism should be with the object of endeavoring to ascertain the considered by a committee of medical men, true nature of its phenomena, and the value of its use in the treatment of disease, and that the Council of the Association be requested to sanction the appointment of a committee for that purpose.

"That this section protests in the strongest manner against the public exhibition, for unscientific and miscellaneous objects, and for purposes of gain or amusement, of the phenomena of hypnotism, as being a practice antagonistic to public morality.'

The first part of this characteristic utterance is excellent, except that a committee, if it had been appointed half a century ago, might have "of medical perhaps not been one exclusively men. It was proposed by Professor Gairdner, of Glasgow, who went on also to move the

second clause, but at the same time intimated that he did not trust much to the legal restrictions" it demands. This also is wise. The dangers of hypnotism to "morality," of it within walls through which justice and if any, are connected with the secret practice the public cannot look to arrest what is wrong; not with public exhibitions," which are under effective restraint from both powers. Some of these exhibitions seem to me repulsive (though not so much so as the morbid cases cultivated by certain distinguished specialists). But others during the last three decades, though open to any observer who paid a couple of shillings, have been conducted with skill and good taste, and with a liberality of mind which the educated observers did not always share. Professor Gairdner, himself a man of distinguished and discursive intelligence, stated in his speech that he had recently attended a demonstration of hypnotism, "for the first time for twenty years,' " and "a change in the attitude of his mind on the subject had been produced by what he had witnessed." Let us hope that even if the Association refuses the desired committee, the Psychological Section will not think it necessary to wait another twenty years before commencing their investigations.