The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

arrived European the fences are so aggressively present as to spoil enjoyment. Messrs. Gurney, Janet, and Binet have shown that the ignored elements are preserved in a split-off portion of the subjects' consciousness which can be tapped in certain ways, and made to give an account of itself (see Vol. I. p. 209). Hypercesthesia of the senses is as common a symptom as anaesthesia. On the skin two points can be discriminated at less than the normal distance. The sense of touch is so delicate that (as M. Delboeuf informs me) a subject after simply poising on her finger-tips a blank card drawn from a pack of similar ones can pick it out from the pack again by its * weight.* We approach here the line where, to many persons, it seems as if something more than the ordinary senses, however sharpened, were required in explanation. I have seen a coin from the operator's pocket repeatedly picked out by the subject from a heap of twenty others,* by its greater * weight ' in the subject's language. — Auditory hypergesthesia may enable a subject to hear a watch tick, or his operator speak, in a distant room. — One of the most extraordinary examples of visual hypersesthesia is that reported by Bergson, in which a subject who seemed to be reading through the back of a book held and looked at by the operator, was really proved to be reading the image of the page reflected on the latter's cornea. The same subject was able to discriminate with the naked eye details in a microscopic preparation. Such cases of * hypersesthesia of vision ' as that reported by Taguet and Sauvaire, where subjects could see things mirrored by non-reflecting bodies, or through opaque pasteboard, would seem rather to belong to * psychical research ' than to the present category.— The ordinary test of visual hyperaouteness in hypnotism is the favorite trick of giving a subject the hallucination of a picture on a blank sheet of cardboard, and then mixing the latter with a lot of other similar sheets. The subject will always find the picture on the original sheet again, and recognize infallibly if it has been turned

* Precautions being taken against differences of temperature and othei grounds of suggestion. over, or upside down, although the bystanders have to re«. sort to artifice to identify it again. The Subject notes peculiarities on the card, too small for waking observation to detect. ■**■ If it be said that the spectators guide him by their manner, their breathing, etc., that is only another proof of his hypersesthesia ; for he undoubtedly is conscious of subtler personal indications (of his operator's mental states especially) than he could notice in his waking state. Examples of this are found in the so-called ' magnetic rapport.' This is a name for the fact that in deep trance, or in lighter trance whenever the suggestion is made, the subject is deaf and blind to everyone but the operator or those spectators to whom the latter expressly awakens his senses. The most violent appeals from anyone else are for him as if non-existent, whilst he obeys the faintest signals on the part of his hypnotizer. If in catalepsy, his limbs will retain their attitude only when the operator moves them ; when others move them they fall down, etc. A more remarkable fact still is that the patient will often answer anyone whom his operator touches, or at whom he even points his finger, in however concealed a manner. All which is rationally explicable by expectation and suggestion, if only it be farther admitted that his senses are acutely sharpened for all the operator's movements, t He often shows great anxiety and restlessness if the latter is out of the room. A favorite experiment of Mr. E. Gurney's was to put the subject's hands through an opaque screen, and cause the operator to point at one finger. That finger presently grew insensible or rigid. A bystander pointing simultaneously at another finger, never made that insensible or rigid. Of course the elective rapport with their operator had been developed in these

* It should be said, however, that the bystander's ability to discriminate unmarked cards and sheets of paper from each other is much greater than one would naturally suppose. f I must repeat, however, that we are here on the verge of possibly unknown forces and modes of communication. Hypnotization at a distance, with no grounds for expectation on the subject's part that it was to be tried, seems pretty well established in certain very rare cases. See in general, for m formation on these matters, the Proeeedmgs of tba Soc. for Vsych. Research, passim.

trained subjects during the hypnotic state, but the phenomenon then occurred in some of them during the waking state, even when their consciousness was absorbed in animated conversation with a fourth party.^ I confess that Avhen I saw these experiments I was impressed with the necessity for admitting between the emanations from different people differences for which we have no name, and a discriminative sensibility for them of the nature of which we can form no clear conception, but which seems to be developed in certain subjects by the hypnotic trance. — The enigmatic reports of the effect of magnets and metals, even if they be due, as many contend, to unintentional suggestion on the operator's part, certainly involve hypersesthetic perception, for the operator seeks as well as possible to conceal the moment when the magnet is brought into play, and yet the subject not only finds it out that moment in a way difficult to understand, but may develop effects which (in the first instance certainly) the operator did not expect to find. Unilateral contractures, movements, paralyses, hallucinations, etc., are made to pass to the other side of the body, hallucinations to disappear, or to change to the complementary color, suggested emotions to pass into their opposites, etc. Many Italian observations agree with the French ones, and the upshot is that if unconscious suggestion lie at the bottom of this matter, the patients show an enormously exalted power of divining what it is they are expected to do. This hypersesthetic perception is what concerns us now.f Its modus cannot yet be said to be defined.

* Here again the perception in question must take place below the threshold of ordinary consciousness, possibly in one of those split-off selves or ' second ' states whose existence we have so often to recognize. f 1 myself veritied many of the above effects of the magnet on a blindfolded subject on whom I was trying them for the first time, and whom I believe to have never heard of them before. The moment, however, an opaque screen was added to the blindfolding, the effects ceased to coincide with the approximation of the magnet, so that it looks as if visual perception had been instrumental in producing them. The subject passed from my observation, so that I never could clear up the mystery. Of course I gave him consciously no hint of what I was looking for.

Changes in the nutrition of the tissues may be produced by suggestion. These effects lead into therapeutics— a subject which I do not propose to treat of here. But I may say that there seems no reasonable ground for doubting that in certain chosen subjects the suggestion of a congestion, a burn, a blister, a raised papule, or a bleeding from the nose or skin, may produce the effect. Messrs. Beaunis, BerjoUj Bernheim, Bourru, Burot, Charcot, Delboeuf, Dumontpallier, Focachon, Forel, Jendrd,ssik, Krafft-Ebing, Liebault, Liegeois, Lipp, Mabille, and others have recently vouched for one or other of these effects. Messrs. Delboeuf and Liegeois have annulled by suggestion, one the effects of a burn, the other of a blister. Delboeuf was led to his experiments after seeing a burn on the skin produced by suggestion, at the Salpetriere, by reasoning that if the idea of a pain could produce inflammation it must be because pain was itself an inflammatory irritant, and that the abolition of it from a real burn ought therefore to entail the absence of inflammation. He applied the actual cautery (as well as vesicants) to symmetrical places on the skin, affirming that no pain should be felt on one of the sides. The result was a dry scorch on that side, with (as he assures me) no aftermark, but on the other side a regular blister with suppuration and a subsequent scar. This explains the innocuity of certain assaults made on subjects during trance. To test simulation, recourse is often had to sticking pins under their finger-nails or through their tongue, to inhalations of strong ammonia, and the like. These irritations, when not felt by the subject, seem to leave no after-consequences. One is reminded of the reported non-inflammatory character of the wounds made on themselves by dervishes in their pious orgies.

On the other hand, the reddenings and bleedings of the skin along certain lines, suggested by tracing lines or pressing objects thereupon, put the accounts handed down to us of the stigmata of the cross appearing on the hands, feet, sides, and forehead of certain Catholic mystics in a new light. As so often happens, a fact is denied until a w^elcome interpretation comes with it. Then it is admitted readily enough; and evidence judged quite insufficient to back a claim, so long as the church had an interest in making it, proves to

b© quite sufficient for modern scientific enlightenment, the moment it appears that a reputed saint can thereby be classed as *a case of hysteroepilepsy.' There remain two other topics, viz., post-hypnotic effects of suggestion, and effects of suggestion in the waking state. Post-hypnotic, or deferred^ suggestions are such as are given to the patients during trance, to take effect after waking. They succeed with a certain number of patients even when the execution is named for a remote period — months or even a year, in one case reported by M. Liegeois. In this way one can make the patient feel a pain, or be paralyzed, or be hungry or thirsty, or have an hallucination, positive or negative, or perform some fantastic action after emerging from his trance. The effect in question may be ordered to take place not immediately, but after an interval of time has elapsed, and the interval may be left to the subject to measure, or may be marked by a certain signal. The moment the signal occurs, or the time is run out, the subject, who until then seems in a perfectly normal waking condition, will experience the suggested effect. In many instances, whilst thus obedient to the suggestion, he seems to fall into the hypnotic condition again. This is proved by the fact that the moment the hallucination or suggested performance is over he forgets it, denies all knowledge of it, and so forth ; and by the further fact that he is 'suggestible ' during its performance, that is, will receive new hallucinations, etc., at command. A moment later and this suggestibility has disappeared. It cannot be said, however, that relapse into the trance is an absolutely necessary condition for the post-hypnotic carrying out of commands, for the subject may be neither suggestible nor amnesic, and may struggle with all the strength of his will against the absurdity of this impulse which he feels rising in him, he knows not why.

In these cases, as in most cases, he forgets the circumstance of the impulse having been suggested to him in « previous trance ; regards it as arising within himself ; and often improvises, as he yields to it, some more or less plausible or ingenious motive by which to justify it to the lookers-on. He acts, in short, with his usual sense of personal spontaneity and freedom ; and the disbelievers in the freedom of the will have naturally made much of these cases in their attempts to show it to be an illusion.

The only really mysterious feature of these deferred suggestions is the patient's absolute ignorance during the interval preceding their execution that they have been deposited in his mind. They will often surge up at the preappointed time, even though you have vainly tried a while before to make him recall the circumstances of their production. The most important class of post-hypnotic suggestions are, of course, those relative to the patient's health — bowels, sleep, and other bodily functions. Among the most interesting (apart from the hallucinations) are those relative to future trances. One can determine the hour and minute, or the signal, at which the patient will of his own accord lapse into trance again. One can make him susceptible in future to another operator who may have been unsuccessful with him in the past. Or more important still in certain cases, one can, by suggesting that certain persons shall never be able hereafter to put him to sleep, remove him for all future time from hypnotic influences which might be dangerous. This, indeed, is the simple and natural safeguard against those * dangers of hypnotism ' of which uninstructed persons talk so vaguely. A subject who knows himself to be ultra-susceptible should never allow himself to be entranced by an operator in whose moral delicacy he lacks complete confidence ; and he can use a trusted operator's suggestions to protect himself against liberties which others, knowing his weakness, might be tempted to take with him.

The mechanism by which the command is retained until the moment for its execution arrives is a mystery which has given rise to much discussion. The experiments of Gurney and the observations of M. Pierre Janet and others on certain hysterical somnabulists seem to prove that it is stored up in consciousness ; not simply organically registered, but that the conscioitsness which thus retains it is split off, dissociated from the rest of the subject's mind. We have here, in short, an experimental production of one of those 'second' states of the personality of which we have spoken so often. Only here the

second state coexists as well as alternates with the first. Gurney had the brilliant idea of tapping this second consciousness by means of the planchette. He found that certain persons, who were both hypnotic subjects and automatic writers, would if their hands were placed on a planchette (after being wakened from a trance in which they had received the suggestion of something to be done at a later time) write out unconsciously the order, or something connected with it. This shows that something inside of them, which could express itself through the hand alone, was continuing to think of the order, and possibly of it alone. These researches have opened a new vista of possible experimental investigations into the so-called * second ' states of the personality.

Some subjects seem almost as obedient to suggestion in the waking state as in sleep, or even more so, according to certain observers. Not only muscular phenomena, but changes of personality and hallucinations are recorded as the result of simple affirmation on the operator's part, without the previous ceremony of * magnetizing ' or putting into the * mesmeric sleep.' These are all trained subjects, however, so far as I know, and the affirmation must apparently be accompanied by the patient concentrating his attention and gazing, however briefly, into the eyes of the operator. It is probable therefore that an extremely rapidly induced condition of trance is a prerequisite for success in these experiments.

I have now made mention of all the more important phenomena of the hypnotic trance. Of their therapeutic or forensic bearings this is not the proper, place to speak. The recent literature of the subject is quite voluminous, but much of it consists in repetition. The best compendious work on the subject is * Der Hypnotismus,' by Dr. A. Moll (Berlin, 1889 ; and just translated into English, N. Y., 1890), which is extraordinarily complete and judicious. The other writings most recommendable are subjoined in the note.*

*Binetand Fere, * Animal Magnetism,' in the International Scientific Series ; A. Bernheim. ' Suggestive Therapeutics ' (N.Y., 1889); J. Lie'geois, Most of them contain a historical sketch and much bibliography. A complete bibliography has been published by M. Dessoir (Berlin, 1888). •De la Suggestion ' (1889) ; E. Gurney, two articles in Mind, vol. ix.— In the recent revival of interest in the history of this subject, it seems a pity that the admirably critical and scientilic work of Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell of Philadelphia should remain relatively so unknown. It is quite worthy to rank with Braid's investigations. See "Five Essays" by the above author, edited by S. Weir Mitchell, Philadelphia, 1859, pp. 141-274

In this final chapter I shall treat of what has sometimes been called psychogenesiSf and try to ascertain just how far the connections of things in the outward environment can account for our tendency to think of, and to react upon, certain things in certain ways and in no others, even though personally we have had of the things in question no experience, or almost no experience, at all. It is a familiar truth that some propositions are necessary. We must attach the predicate * equal ' to the subject ' opposite sides of a parallelogram ' if we think those terms together at all, whereas we need not in any such way attach the predicate ' rainy,' for example, to the subject * to-morrow.' The dubious sort of coupling of terms is universally admitted to be due to * experience ' ; the certain sort is ascribed to the * organic structure ' of the mind. This structure is in turn supposed by the so-called apriorists to be of transcendental origin, or at any rate not to be explicable by experience ; whilst by evolutionary empiricists it is supposed to be also due to experience, only not to the experience of the individual, but to that of his ancestors as far back as one may please to go. Our emotional and instinctive tendencies, our irresistible impulses to couple certain movements with the perception or thought of certain things, are also features of our connate mental structure, and like the necessary judgments, are interpreted by the apriorists and the empiricists in the Bame warring ways.

I shall try in the course of the chapter to make plain three tliiugs : 1) That, taking the word experience as it is universally understood, the experience of the race can no more account for our necessary or a^Wor* judgments than the experience of the individual can ; 2) That there is no good evidence for the belief that our instinctive reactions are fruits of our ancestors' education in the midst of the same environment, transmitted to us at birth.

3) That the features of our organic mental structure cannot be explained at all by our conscious intercourse with the outer environment, but must rather be ui^derstood as congenital variations, ' accidental ' * in the first instance, but then transmitted as fixed features of the race. On the whole, then, the account which the apriorists give of ilnQ facts is that which I defend ; although I should contend (as will hereafter appear) for a naturalistic view of their cause.

The first thing I have to say is that all schools (however they otherwise differ) must allow that the elementary qualities of cold, heat, pleasure, pain, red, blue, sound, silence, etc., are original, innate, or a priori properties of our subjective nature, even though they should require the touch of experience to waken them into actual consciousness, and should slumber, to all eternity, without it. This is so on either of the two hypotheses we may make concerning the relation of the feelings to the realities at whose touch they become alive. For in the first place, if a feeling do not mirror the reality which wakens it and to which we say it corresponds, if it mirror no reality whatever outside of the mind, it of course is a purely mental product. By its very definition it can be nothing else. But in the second place, even if it do mirror the reality exactly, still it is not that reality itself, it is a duplication of it, the result of a mental reaction. And that the mind should have the power of reacting in just thai duplicate way can only be stated as a harmony between its nature and the nature of the truth outside of it, a harmony whereby it follows that the qualities of both parties match.

* * Accidental ' in the Darwinian sense, as belonging to a cycle of cau sation inaccessible to tiie present order of research. The originality of these elements is not, then, a question for dispute. The warfare of philosophers is exclusively relative to their fobms of combination. The empiricist maintains that these forms can only follow the order of combination in which the elements were originally awakened by the impressions of the external world; the apriorists insist, on the contrary, that some modes of combination, at any rate, follow from the natures of the elements themselves, and that no amount of experience can modify this result.

The phrase * organic mental structure ' names the matter in dispute. Has the mind such a structure or not ? Are its contents arranged from the start, or is the arrangement they may possess simply due to the shuffling of them by experience in an absolutely plastic bed ? Now the first thing to make sure of is that when we talk of * experience,' we attach a definite meaning to the word. Experience means experience of something foreign supposed to impress us^ whether spontaneously or in consequence of our own exertions and acts. Impressions, as we well know, afi'ect certain orders of sequence and coexistence, and the mind's habits copy the habits of the impressions, so that our images of things assume a time- and space-arrangement which resembles the time- and space-arrangements outside. To uniform outer coexistences and sequences correspond constant conjunctions of ideas, to fortuitous coexistences and sequences ijasual conjunctions of ideas. We are sure that fire will burn and water wet us, less sure that thunder will come ^fter lightning, not at all sure whether a strange dog will bark at us or let us go by. In these ways experience moulds us every hour, and makes of our minds a mirror of the time- and space-connections between the things in the vsrorld. The principle of habit within us so fixes the copy at last that we find it difficult even to imagine how the outward order could possibly be different from what it is, and we continually divine from the present what the future is to be. These habits of transition, from one thought to anothei, are features of mental structure which were lack-

ing in us at birth ; we can see their growth under experience's moulding finger, and we can see how often experience undoes her own work, and for an earlier order substitutes a new one. ' The order of experienee,' in this matter of the time- and space-conjunctions of things, is thus an indisputably vera causa of our forms of thought. It is our educator, our sovereign helper and friend ; and its name, standing for something with so real and definite a use, ought to be kept sacred and encumbered with no vaguer meaning.

If cdl the connections among ideas in the mind could be interpreted as so many combinations of sense-data wrought into fixity in this way from without, then experience in the common and legitimate sense of the word would be the sole fashioner of the mind. The empirical school in psychology has in the main contended that they can be so interpreted. Before our generation, it was the experience of the individual only which was meant. But when one nowadays says that the human mind owes its present shape to experience, he means the experience of ancestors as well. Mr. Spencer's statement of this is the earliest emphatic one, and deserves quotation in full : *

" The supposition that the inner cohesions are adjusted to the outer persistences by accumulated experience of those outer persistences is in harmony with all our actual knowledge of mental phenomena. Though in so far as reflex actions and instincts are concerned, the experiencehypothesis seems insufficient; yet its seeming insufficiency occurs only where the evidence is beyond our reach. Nay, even here such fev^r facts as we can get point to the conclusion that automatic psychical connections result from the registration of experiences continued for numberless generations.

" In brief, the case stands thus : It is agreed that all psychical relations, save the absolutely indissoluble, are determined by experiences. Their various strengths are admitted, other things equal, to be proportionate to the multiplication of experiences. It is an unavoidable * The passage is in § 207 of the Principles of Psychology, at the end of the chapter entitled 'Reason.' I italicize certain words in order to show that the essence of this explanation is to demand nuTnerically frequent experiences. The bearing of this remark will later appear. (Cf. pp. 641-2, infra.)

eorollary that an infinity of experiences will produce a psychical relation that is indissoluble. Though such infinity of experiences cannot be received by a single individual, yet it may be received by the succession of individuals forming a race. And if there is a transmission of induced tendencies in the nervous system, it is inferrible that all psychical relations whatever^ from the necessary to the fortuitous, result from the experiences of the corresponding external relations ; and are so brought into harmony with them.

"Thus, the experience-hypothesis furnishes an adequate solution. The genesis of instinct, the development of memory and reason out of it, and the consolidation of rational actions and inferences into instinctive ones, are alike explicable on the single principle that the cohesion between psychical states is proportionate to the frequency with which the relation between the answering external phenomena has been repeated in experienxie. " The universal law that, other things equal, the cohesion of psychical states is proportionate to the frequency with which they have followed one another in experience, supplies an explanation of the socalled ' forms of thought,' as soon as it is supplemented by the law that habitual psychical successions entail some hereditary tendency to such successions, which, under persistent conditions, will become cumulative in generation after generation. We saw that the establishment of those compound reflex actions called instincts is comprehensible on the principle that inner relations are, hy perpetual repetition, organized into correspondence with outer relations. We have now to observe that the establishment of those consolidated, those indissoluble, those instinctive mental relations constituting our ideas of Space and Time is comprehensible on the same principle. For if even to external relations that are often experienced during the life of a single organism, answering internal relations are established that become next to automatic — if such a combination of psychical changes as that which guides a savage in hitting a bird with an arrow becomes, by constant repetition, so organized as to be performed almost without thought of the processes of adjustment gone through — and if skill of this kind is so far transmissible that particular races of men become characterized by particular aptitudes, which are nothing else than partially-organized psychical connections ; then, if there exist certain external relations which are experienced by all organisms at all instants of their waking lives — relations which are absolutely constant, absolutely universal — there will be established answering internal relations that are absolutely constant, absolutely universal. Such relations we have in those of Space and Time.

The organization of subjective relations adjusted to these objective relations has been cumulative, not in each race of creatures only, but throughout successive races of creatures ; and such subjective relations have, therefore, become more consolidated than all others. Being experienced in every perception and every action of each creature, these connections among outer existences must, for this reason too, be rosi)onded to by connections among inner feelings, that are, above all others, indissoluble. As the substrata of all other relations in the nonego, they must be responded to by conceptions that are the substrata of all other relations in the ego. Being the constant and infinitelyrepeated elements of thought, they must become the automatic elements of thought — the elements of thought which it is impossible to get rid of — the ' forms of intuition.'

" Such, it seems to me, is the only possible reconciliation between the experience-hypothesis and the hypothesis of the transcendental ists ; neither of which is tenable by itself. Insurmountable difficulties are presented by the Kantian doctrine (as we shall hereafter see) ; and the antagonist doctrine, taken alone, presents difficulties that are equally insurmountable. To rest with the unqualified assertion that, antecedent to experience, the mind is a blank, is to ignore the questions— whence comes the power of organizing experiences ? whence arise the different degrees of that power possessed by different races of organisms, and different individuals of the same race ? If, at birth, there exists nothing but a passive receptivity of impressions, why is not a horse as educable as a man ? Should it be said that language makes the difference, then why do not the cat and the dog, reared in the same household, arrive at equal degrees and kinds of intelligence ? Understood in its current form, the experience-hypothesis implies that the presence of a definitely-organized nervous system is a circumstance of no moment — a fact not needing to be taken into account ! Yet it is the all-important fact— the fact to which, in one sense, the criticisms of Leibnitz and others pointed — the fact without which an assimilation of experiences is inexplicable. Throughout the animal kingdom in general, the

actions are dependent on the nervous structure. The physiologist shows us that each reflex movement implies the agency of certain nerves and ganglia ; that a development of complicated instincts is accompanied by complication of the nervous centres and their commissural connections ; that the same creature in different stages, as larva and imago for example, changes its instincts as its nervous structure changes ; and that as we advance to creatures of high intelligence, a vast increase in the size and in the complexity of the nervous system takes place. What is the obvious inference ? It is that the ability to co-ordinate impressions and to perform the appropriate actions always implies the preexistence of certain nerves arranged in a certain way. What is the meaning of the human brain ? It is that the many established relations among its parts stand for so many established relations among the psychical changes. Each of the constant connections among the fibres of the cerebral masses answers to some constant connection of phenomena in the experiences of the race. Just as the organized arrangement subsisting between the sensory nerves of the nostrils and the motor nerves of the respiratory muscles not only makes possible a sneeze, but also, in the newly-born infant, implies sneezings to be hereafter performed ; so, all the organized arrangements subsisting among the nerves of the