Let us suppose, then, that we are standing at our present point, but with no more knowledge of hypnotic phenomena than existed in the boyhood of Mesmer. We shall know well enough what, as experimental psychologists, we desire to do; but we shall have little notion of how to set about it. We desire to summon at our will, and to subdue to our use, these rarely emergent sleep-waking faculties. On their physical side, we desire to develop their inhibition of pain and their reinforcement of energy; on their intellectual side, their concentration of attention; on their emotional side, their sense of freedom, expansion, joy. Above all, we desire to get hold of those supernormal faculties—telepathy and telæsthesia—of which we have caught fitful glimpses in somnambulism and in dream.
Yet to such hopes as these the so-called "experience of ages" (generally a very short and scrappy induction!) will seem altogether to refuse any practical outcome. History, indeed,—with the wonted vagueness of history,—will offer us a long series of stories of the strange sanative suggestion or influence of man on man;—beginning, say, with David and Saul, or with David and Abishag, and ending with Valentine Greatrakes,—or with the Stuarts' last touch for the King's evil. But in knowledge of how actually to set about it, we should still be just on the level of the Seven Sages.[56]
And now let the reader note this lesson on the unexhausted possibilities of human organisms and human life. Let him take his stand at one of the modern centres of hypnotic practice,—in Professor Bernheim's hospital-ward, or Dr. van Renterghem's clinique; let him see the hundreds of patients thrown daily into hypnotic trance, in a few moments, and as a matter of course; and let him then remember that this process, which now seems as obvious and easy as giving a pill, was absolutely unknown not only to Galen and to Celsus, but to Hunter and to Harvey; and when at last discovered was commonly denounced as a fraudulent fiction, almost up to the present day. Nay, if one chances to have watched as a boy some cure effected in Dr. Elliotson's Mesmeric Hospital, before neglect and calumny had closed that too early effort for human good;—if one has seen popular indifference and professional prejudice check the new healing art for a generation;—is not one likely to have imbibed a deep distrust of all a priori negations in the matter of human faculty;—of all obiter dicta of eminent men on subjects with which they do not happen to be acquainted? Would not one, after such an experience, rather choose (with Darwin) "the fool's experiment" than any immemorial ignorance which has stiffened into an unreasoning incredulity?
Mesmer's experiment was almost a "fool's experiment," and Mesmer himself was almost a charlatan. Yet Mesmer and his successors,—working from many different points of view, and following many divergent theories,—have opened an ever-widening way, and have brought us now to a position where we can fairly hope, by experiments made no longer at random, to reproduce and systematise most of those phenomena of spontaneous somnambulism which once seemed to lie so tantalisingly beyond our grasp.
That promise is great indeed; yet it is well to begin by considering precisely how far it extends. We must not suppose that we shall at once be subduing to our experiment a central, integrated, reasonable Self.
We must be content (at first at any rate) if we can affect the personality in the same limited way as hysteria and somnambulism have affected it; but yet can act deliberately and usefully where these have acted hurtfully and at random. It is enough to hope that we may inhibit pain, as it is inhibited for the hysteric; or concentrate attention, as it is concentrated for the somnambulist; or change the tastes and passions, as these are changed in alternating personalities; or (best of all) recover and fix something of that supernormal faculty of which we have caught fugitive glimpses in vision and dream. Our proof of the origination of any phenomenon in the deeper strata of our being must lie in the intrinsic nature of the faculty exhibited;—not in the wisdom of its actual direction. That must often depend on the order given from above the threshold; just as the magic mill of the fable continues magical, although, for lack of the proper formula to stop it, it be still grinding out superfluous salt at the bottom of the sea.
This brief introduction will, I hope, show that hypnotism is no disconnected or extraneous insertion into experimental psychology, but rather a summary name for a group of necessary, though empirical and isolated, attempts to bring under control that range of submerged faculty which has already from time to time risen into our observation. The inquiry has been mainly the work of a few distinguished men, who have each of them pushed some useful ideas as far as they could, but whose work has not been adequately supported by successors.
I should much doubt whether there have been a hundred men in all countries together, at the ordinary level of professional intelligence, who during the century since Mesmer have treated hypnotism as the serious study of their lives. Some few of the men who have so treated it have been men of great force and strong convictions; and it will be found that there has consequently been a series of sudden developments of groups of phenomena, differing much from each other, but corresponding with the special beliefs and desires of the person who headed each movement in turn. I will mention some of the chief examples, so as to show the sporadic nature of the efforts made, and the great variety of the phenomena elicited.
The first name that must be mentioned is, of course, that of Mesmer himself. He believed primarily in a sanative effluence, and his method seems to have been a combination of passes, suggestion, and a supposed "metallotherapy" or "magneto-therapy"—the celebrated baquet—which no doubt was merely a form of suggestion. His results, though very imperfectly described, seem to have been peculiar to himself. The crise which many of his patients underwent sounds like a hysterical attack; but there can be no doubt that rapid improvement in symptoms often followed it, or he would not have made so great an impression on savants as well as on the fashionable world of Paris. To Mesmer, then, we owe the first conception of the therapeutic power of a sudden and profound nervous change. To Mesmer, still more markedly, we owe the doctrine of a nervous influence or effluence passing from man to man,—a doctrine which, though it must assume a less exclusive importance than he assigned to it, cannot, in my view, be altogether ignored or denied.
The leading figure among his immediate successors, the Marquis de Puységur, seems from his writings[57] to have been one of the ablest and most candid men who have practised mesmerism; and he was one of the very few who have conducted experiments, other than therapeutic, on a large scale. The somnambulic state may also be said to have been his discovery; and he obtained clairvoyance or telæsthesia in so many instances, and recorded them with so much of detail, that it is hard to attribute all to mal-observation, or even to telepathy from persons present. Other observers, as Bertrand, a physician of great promise, followed in the same track, and this brief period was perhaps the most fertile in disinterested experiments that our subject has yet known. Much was then done in Germany also; and there, too, there is scattered testimony to supernormal powers.[58]