Cases like these are certainly striking enough to give a considerable impetus to further experiment. Hypnotism, however, has in England many prejudices to contend with. I shall touch on one such prejudice only-a very natural one and germane to the main argument of this paper. These duplications of state,' it is said, are not natural; and what is unnatural, even if it is not morbid, can never be more than a mere curiosity.' I would ask of such an objector one single question: Which state, then, do you consider, as unnatural, your own ordinary sleep or your own ordinary waking?

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This rejoinder goes, I think, to the root of the matter; for we do indubitably undergo every day of our lives a change of state, a shifting of our internal mechanism, which is closely parallel to the artificial changes whose induction I am here recommending. Our familiar sleep, whether considered from the psychical or the physiological side, has a curious history, strange potentialities. In its psychical aspect-to take the point which here most concerns us--it involves at least the rudiments of a 'second state,' of an independent. memory. I should like, had I space, to show how the mere recurrence of a dream-scene- -a scene which has no prototype in waking life is the first stage on the way to those recurrent accesses of somnambulism, linked by continuous memory, which have developed into the actual ordinary life of Félida X. Leaving this point for future treatment, and passing to sleep's physiological aspect, we recognise in it the compromise or resultant of many tentative duplications of state which our lowly ancestors have known. Their earliest differentiation of condition, it may be, was merely the change between light and darkness, or between motion and rest. Then comes encystation, a fruitful quiescence, originally, perhaps, a mere immobility of self-defence, but taken advantage of for reproductive effort. And passing from protozoa to metazoa, we find numerous adaptations of this primitive duplicability of condition. We find sleep utilised as a protection against hunger, as a protection against cold. We find animals for whom what we call 'true sleep' is wanting, whose circumstances do not demand any such change or interruption in the tenor of their life-long way.

Yet why describe this undifferentiated life-history as a state of waking rather than of sleep? Why assume that sleep is the acquired, vigilance the 'normal' condition? It would not be hard to defend an opposite thesis. The new-born infant might urge with cogency that his habitual state of slumber was primary as regards the individual, ancestral as regards the race; resembling at least, far more closely than does our adult life, a primitive or protozoic habit. Mine,' he might say, is a centrally stable state. It would need only some change in external conditions (as my permanent immersion in a nutritive fluid) to be safely and indefinitely maintained. Your waking state, on the other hand, is centrally unstable. While you

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talk and bustle around me you are living on your physiological capital, and the mere prolongation of vigilance is torture and death.'

A paradox such as this forms no part of my argument; but it may remind us that physiology at any rate hardly warrants us in speaking of our waking state as if that alone represented our true selves, and every deviation from it must be at best a mere interruption. Vigilance in reality is but one of two co-ordinate phases of our personality, which we have acquired or differentiated from each other during the stages of our long evolution. And just as these two states have come to coexist for us in advantageous alternation, so also other states may come to coexist with these, in response to new needs of the still evolving organism.

6

And I will now suggest two methods in which such states as those described, say, in Dr. Voisin's or in Dr. Pitres' cases, might be turned to good account. In the world around us are many physical invalids and many moral invalids,' and of both these classes a certain percentage are sure to prove hypnotisable, with patience and care. Let us try to improve the moral invalid's character by hypnotic suggestions of self-restraint, which will continue effective after he wakes. And let us try to enable the physical invalid to carry on his intellectual life without the perturbing accompaniment of pain. I am not bringing out a panacea, and I expect that with the English race, and in our present state of knowledge, but few of these experiments will succeed. But increased experience will bring the process under fuller control, will enable us to hypnotise a larger proportion of persons and to direct the resulting phenomena with more precision. What is needed is the perseverance in experiment which springs from an adequate realisation of the ultimate gain, from a conviction that the tortuous inlet which we are navigating is one of the mouths of a river which runs up far into the unexplored interior of our being.

I have dealt elsewhere with some further cases which go to show the persistent efficacy of moralising suggestions-suggestions mainly of abstinence from pernicious indulgences-when made to a subject in the hypnotic trance." It must suffice here to point out that such moralisation, whether applied to a sane or insane subject, must by no means be considered as a mere trick or a mere abnormality. It is but the systematisation of a process on which religious and moral 'revivals' have always largely depended. When some powerful personage has thrown many weaker minds into a state of unusual perturbation, unusual plasticity, there is an element in that psychical tumult which may be utilised for lasting good. A strong suggestion may be made, and its effect on the brain will be such that it will work itself out, almost automatically, perhaps for years to come. When Father Mathew spread the temperance pledge through Ireland he showed this power at its best. What it can be at its worst we see, for in

11 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, part x. (Trübner, 1886).

stance, in the recent epidemic of frenzy in the Bahamas, where the hysterical symptoms were actually the main object sought, and the dogma only served to give to that hysteria a stimulating flavour of brimstone. Scenes not dissimilar have been witnessed in England too; yet the sober moralist has been forced to recognise that a germ of better life has often been dropped, and has quickened, amid the turbulence of what to him might seem a mere scandalous orgy.

Just so did the orthodox physician look on in disgusted contempt at the tumultuous crises of the patients around Mesmer's baquet. But science has now been able to extract from that confused scene its germ of progress, and to use a part of Mesmer's processes to calm the very accesses which Mesmer employed them to generate. Let her attempt, then, to extract the health-giving element from that moral turbulence as well, and to use the potency which in ignorant hands turns men and women into hysterical monomaniacs, to revive in the spirits which she dominates the docility of the little child.

This last phrase represents a true, an important analogy. The art of education, as we know, rests on the physiological fact that the child's brain receives impressions more readily, and retains them more lastingly, than the adult's. And those of us who have been well drilled in childhood are not apt to consider that the advantage thus gained for us was an unfair or tricky one, nor even that virtue has been made unduly easy to us, so that we deserve no credit for doing right. It surely need not, then, be considered as over-reaching Destiny, or outwitting the Moral Law, if we take persons whose early receptiveness has been abused by bad example and try to reproduce that receptiveness by a physiological process, and to imprint hypnotic suggestions of a salutary kind.

I ventured to make a proposal of this kind in a paper published a year ago; but, although it attracted some comment as a novelty, I cannot flatter myself that it was taken au sérieux by the pedagogic world. But as I write these lines I see from a report of the Association Française pour l'Avancement des Sciences (Session de Nancy, 1886) that the 'Section de Pédagogie' has actually passed a resolution desiring 'que des expériences de suggestion hypnotique soient tentées, dans un but de moralisation et d'éducation, sur quelques-uns des sujets les plus notoirement mauvais et incorrigibles des écoles primaires.' I commend the idea then, with the sense that I am not alone in my paradox, to the attention of practical philanthropists.

My second suggestion-namely, that we may conceivably learn to carry on our intellectual life in a state of insusceptibility to physical pain, may appear a quite equally bold one. We admit,' the critics might say, that a man in the hypnotic trance is insensible to pinching; but, since he can also notoriously, when in that state, be made to believe that his name is Titus Oates, or that a candle-end piece of plum cake, or any other absurdity, the intellectual work

which he performs in that mood of mind is not likely to be worth much.' But my point is, as may have been already gathered, that this clean-cut, definite conception of the hypnotic state is now shown to have been crude and rudimentary. Dr. Pitres' case, above cited, (where the patient was restored to ordinary life in all respects except that she continued insensible to pain), is a mere sample of cases daily becoming more numerous, where power is gained to dissociate the elements of our being in novel ways, to form from them, if I may so say, not only the one strange new compound 'hypnotic trance,' but a whole series of compounds marking the various stages between that and the life of every day. Hysterical phenomena, now for the first time studied with something like the attention which they deserve, point strongly in this direction. And apart from hysteria, apart from hypnotism, we find in active and healthy life scattered hints of the possible absence of pain during vigorous intellectual effort. From the candidate in a competitive examination who forgets his toothache till he comes out again, to the soldier in action unconscious of the bullet-wound till he faints from loss of blood, we have instances enough of an exaltation or concentration which has often made the resolute spirit altogether unconscious of conditions which would have been absorbing to the ordinary man. And here too, as in the case of moral suggestibility, already dealt with, the function of science is to regularise the accidental and to elicit from the mingled phenomenon its permanent boon. Already men attempt to do this by a mere chemical agency. There have been philosophers who have sought in laudanum intellectual lucidity and bodily repose. There have been soldiers who have supplemented with Dutch courage 'the ardour of martial fire. Philosopher and soldier alike expose themselves to an unhappy reaction. But by the induction of hypnotic anæsthesia we are taking a shorter road to our object; we are acting on the central nervous system without damaging stomach or liver on the way. It was an abridgment of this kind when subcutaneous injection of morphia replaced in so many cases morphia taken by the mouth. Yet though the evil done in transitu was subtler and slower evil still was done. On the other hand the direct nonchemical action on the central nervous system, in which hypnotism consists, is not proved to be in any way necessarily injurious, and has thus far, when under careful management, resulted almost uniformly in good. Such at least is the view of all physicians, so far as I know, who have practised it themselves on a large scale, though it is not the general view at present of those men-physicians or otherswho are content to judge from hearsay and to write at second-hand.

Let us not then, I would say, be satisfied if we can merely give some poor sufferer a good night by hypnotism, or even if we can operate on him painlessly in a state of trance. Let us approach the topic of the banishment of pain in a more thoroughgoing and

bolder spirit. Looking at that growing class of civilised persons who suffer from neuralgia, indigestion, and other annoying but not dangerous forms of malaise, let us consider whether we cannot induce -in those of them who are fortunate enough to be readily hypnotisable-a third condition of life, which shall be as waking but without its uneasiness and as sleep without the blankness of its repose, a state in which the mind may go serenely onward and the body have no power to distract her energy or to dispute her sway.

Is there anything in nature to render this ideal impossible? Let us consider the history of pain. Pain, it may be plausibly suggested, is an advantage acquired by our ancestors in the course of their struggle for existence. It would be useless to the fortunate animalcule, which, if you chop it in two, is simply two animalcules instead of one. But as soon as the organism is complex enough to suffer partial injury, and active enough to check or avoid such injury before it has gone far, the pain becomes a useful warning, and the sense of pain is thus one of the first and most generalised of the perceptive faculties which place living creatures in relation with the external world. And to the human infant it is necessary still. The burnt child must have some reason to dread the fire, or he will go on poking it with his fingers. But, serviceable though pain may still be to the child and the savage, civilised men and women have now a good deal more of it than they can find any use for. Some kinds of pain, indeed (like neuralgia, which prevents the needed rest), are wholly detrimental to the organism and have arisen by mere correlation with other susceptibilities which are in themselves beneficial. Now if this correlation were inevitable-if it were impossible to have acute sense-perceptions, vivid emotional development, without these concomitant nervous pains-we should have to accept the annoyance without more ado. But certain spontaneously occurring facts, and certain experimental facts, have shown us that the correlation is not inevitable; that the sense of pain can be abolished, while other sensibilities are retained, to an extent far beyond what the common experience of life would have led us to suppose possible.

Our machinery is hampered by a system of checks, intended to guard against dangers which we can now meet in other ways, and often operating as a serious hindrance to the work of our manufactory. A workman here and there has hit on an artifice for detaching these checks, with signal advantage, and is beginning to report to the managers his guess at a wider application of the seemingly trivial contrivance.

Be it mentioned too that not only pain itself, but anxiety, ennui, intellectual fatigue, may be held in abeyance by hypnotic treatment and suggestion. There is not, indeed, much evidence of any increase. of sheer intellectual acumen in the hypnotic state, but in most kinds