IV. FUKTHEK PEOBLEMS OF HYPNOTISM. (II.)

By EDMUND GUKNEY. IN my last paper (MiND No. 46) I drew attention to the subject of hypnotisation at a distance, as one which certain recent cases had made it as impossible for students of Hypnotism as it must in any case have been for students of Telepathy to overlook. I advanced the view that these telepathic entrancements necessitated no hypothesis of will-power or ' psychic force ' capable of producing effects in external matter viz., the organism of B, the ' subject ' which differed from their cause in A, the hypnotiser ; that the phenomenon might be perfectly well regarded as a genuine instance of thought-transference or mental sugges- tion certain mental movements of A's, and certain brain- movements correlated therewith, being sympathetically reproduced in the mind and brain of B, who was entranced by the idea of trance in association with the idea of A, just as he might be entranced by those ideas when suggested by A's voice and presence. I further pointed out that it is quite in accordance with what we know of telepathy in other directions that these ideas, when transferred, should take effect in some secondary plane of the ' subject's ' mind a plane segregated off from the conscious self as ordinarily understood. 1 And I must now resume the discussion by recurring for a brief space to the connexion between tele- pathic hypnotism and other forms of telepathy, which occupy the greater portion of Phantasms of the Living. I may begin by showing how, on the view which I have advanced as to the former, a certain difficulty, or rather a certain lacuna, which the latter present, seems to be removed. To state the position briefly the principal telepathic phenomena dealt with in that book are (1) experiments in thought-transference, where ' agent ' and ' percipient ' are near one another, and where some prominent idea in the ' agent's ' mind is reproduced in the ' percipient's ' mind as an idea simply ; and (2) cases of spontaneous occurrence 1 For further proofs of the reality of mental processes carried on apart from the normal stream of the individual's consciousness, and in that sense without his knowledge, see Mr. Myers's paper on " Automatic Writing,' 3 and my own on " Peculiarities of certain Post-hypnotic States," in pt. xi. of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.