It were superfluous to tell again the familiar story of Mesmer's performances at Paris. While Mesmer's theory of 'magnetism' was denounced by contemporary science, the discovery of the hypnotic sleep was made by his pupil, Puységur. This gentleman was persuaded that instances of 'thought-transference' (not through known channels of sense) occurred between the patient and the magnetiser, and he also believed that he had witnessed cases of 'clairvoyance,' 'lucidity,' vue à distance, in which the patient apparently beheld places and events remote in space. These things would now be explained by 'unconscious suggestion' in the more sceptical schools of psychological science. The Revolution interrupted scientific study in France to a great degree, but 'somnambulism' (the hypnotic sleep) and 'magnetism' were eagerly examined in Germany. Modern manuals, for some reason, are apt to overlook these German researches and speculations. (Compare Mr. Vincent's 'Elements of Hypnotism,' p. 34.) The Schellings were interested; Ritter thought he had detected a new force, 'Siderism.' Mr. Wallace, in his preface to Hegel's 'Philosophie des Geistes,' speaks as if Ritter had made experiments in telepathy. He may have done so, but his 'Siderismus' (Tübingen, 1808) is a Report undertaken for the Academy of Munich, on the doings of an Italian water-finder, or 'dowser.' Ritter gives details of seventy-four experiments in 'dowsing' for water, metals, or coal. He believes in the faculty, but not in 'psychic' explanations, or the Devil. He talks about 'electricity' (pp. 170, 190). He describes his precautions to avoid vulgar fraud, but he took no precautions against unconscious thought-transference. He reckoned the faculty 'temperamental' and useful.
Amoretti, at Milan, examined hundreds of cases of the so-called Divining Rod, and Jung Stilling became an early spiritualist and 'full-welling fountain head' of ghost stories.
Probably the most important philosophical result of the early German researches into the hypnotic slumber is to be found in the writings of Hegel. Owing to his peculiar use of a terminology, or scientific language, all his own, it is extremely difficult to make Hegel's meaning even moderately clear. Perhaps we may partly elucidate it by a similitude of Mr. Frederic Myers. Suppose we compare the ordinary everyday consciousness of each of us to a spectrum, whose ends towards each extremity fade out of our view.
Beyond the range of sight there may be imagined a lower or physiological end: for our ordinary consciousness, of course, is unaware of many physiological processes which are eternally going on within us. Digestion, so long as it is healthy, is an obvious example. But hypnotic experiment makes it certain that a patient, in the hypnotic condition, can consciously, or at least purposefully, affect physiological processes to which the ordinary consciousness is blind—for example, by raising a blister, when it is suggested that a blister must be raised. Again (granting the facts hypothetically and merely for the sake of argument), at the upper end of the spectrum, beyond the view of ordinary everyday consciousness, knowledge may be acquired of things which are out of the view of the consciousness of every day. For example (for the sake of argument let us admit it), unknown and remote people and places may be seen and described by clairvoyance, or vue à distance.
Now Hegel accepted as genuine the facts which we here adduce merely for the sake of argument, and by way of illustrations. But he did not regard the clairvoyant consciousness (or whatever we call it) which, ex hypothesi, is untrammelled by space, or even by time, as occupying what we style the upper end of the psychical spectrum. On the contrary, he placed it at the lower end. Hegel's upper end 'loses itself in light;' the lower end, qui voit tant de choses, as La Fontaine's shepherd says, is not 'a sublime mental phase, and capable of conveying general truths.' Time and space do not thwart the consciousness at Hegel's lower end, which springs from 'the great soul of nature.' But that lower end, though it may see for Jeanne d'Arc at Valcouleurs a battle at Rouvray, a hundred leagues away, does not communicate any lofty philosophic truths.[14] The phenomena of clairvoyance, in Hegel's opinion, merely indicate that the 'material' is really 'ideal,' which, perhaps, is as much as we can ask from them. 'The somnambulist and clairvoyant see without eyes, and carry their visions directly into regions where the waiting consciousness of orderly intelligence cannot enter' (Wallace). Hegel admits, however, that 'in ordinary self-possessed conscious life' there are traces of the 'magic tie,' 'especially between female friends of delicate nerves,' to whom he adds husband and wife, and members of the same family. He gives (without date or source) a case of a girl in Germany who saw her brother lying dead in a hospital at Valladolid. Her brother was at the time in the hospital, but it was another man in the nest bed who was dead. 'It is thus impossible to make out whether what the clairvoyants really see preponderates over what they deceive themselves in.'
As long as the facts which Hegel accepted are not officially welcomed by science, it may seem superfluous to dispute as to whether they are attained by the lower or the higher stratum of our consciousness. But perhaps the question here at issue may be elucidated by some remarks of Dr. Max Dessoir. Psychology, he says, has proved that in every conception and idea an image or group of images must be present. These mental images are the recrudescence or recurrence of perceptions. We see a tree, or a man, or a dog, and whenever we have before our minds the conception or idea of any of these things the original perception of them returns, though of course more faintly. But in Dr. Dessoir's opinion these revived mental images would reach the height of actual hallucinations (so that the man, dog, or tree would seem visibly present) if other memories and new sensations did not compete with them and check their development.
Suppose, to use Mlle. Ferrand's metaphor, a human body, living, but with all its channels of sensation hitherto unopened. Open the sense of sight to receive a flash of green colour, and close it again. Apparently, whenever the mind informing this body had the conception of green (and it could have no other) it would also have an hallucination of green, thus
'Annihilating all that's made,
To a green thought in a green shade.'
Now, in sleep or hypnotic trance the competition of new sensations and other memories is removed or diminished, and therefore the idea of a man, dog, or tree once suggested to the hypnotised patient, does become an actual hallucination. The hypnotised patient sees the absent object which he is told to see, the sleeper sees things not really present.
Our primitive state, before the enormous competition of other memories and new sensations set in, would thus be a state of hallucination. Our normal present condition, in which hallucination is checked by competing memories and new sensations, is a suppression of our original, primitive, natural tendencies. Hallucination represents 'the main trunk of our psychical existence.'[15] In Dr. Dessoir's theory this condition of hallucination is man's original and most primitive condition, but it is not a higher, rather a lower state of spiritual activity than the everyday practical unhallucinated consciousness.
This is also the opinion of Hegel, who supposes our primitive mental condition to be capable of descrying objects remote in space and time. Mr. Myers, as we saw, is of the opposite opinion, as to the relative dignity and relative reality of the present everyday self, and the old original fundamental Self. Dr. Dessoir refrains from pronouncing a decided opinion as to whether the original, primitive, hallucinated self within us does 'preside over powers and actions at a distance,' such as clairvoyance; but he believes in hypnotisation at a distance. His theory, like Hegel's, is that of 'atavism,' or 'throwing back' to some very remote ancestral condition. This will prove of interest later.
Hegel, at all events, believed in the fact of clairvoyance (though deeming it of little practical use); he accepted telepathy ('the magic tie'); he accepted interchange of sensations between the hypnotiser and the hypnotised; he believed in the divining rod, and, unlike Kant, even in 'Scottish second-sight.' 'The intuitive soul oversteps the conditions of time and space; it beholds things remote, things long past, and things to come.'[16]
The pendulum of thought has swung back a long way from the point whither it was urged by David Hume. Hegel remarks: 'The facts, it might seem, first of all call for verification. But such verification would be superfluous to those on whose account it was called for, since they facilitate the inquiry for
