When the hypnotist causes the subject to perceive or to experience that which, without the hypnotic influence would not be perceived or experienced, we speak of the action of the hypnotist as suggestion no matter whether it was purely mental (by thought and will), or accompanied by spoken words. Here we meet the first problem and one apparently specific to hypnotic phenomena: How is it possible that vivid sensations can be produced by suggestion, that is, without the slightest trace of the proper stimulation? In thus stating the problem we make the-silent assumption that the normal perceptions which correspond to reality must always be produced by physical stimulation, and that any state of consciousness which equals these normal perceptions in everything except its cause must be of the character of an abnormal or morbid state. We think that a perception that is not caused by the;, "right" kind of stimulation is a deception, a fraud of some kind. But have we a right to draw such a conclusion? Have we a right to make that sharp distinction between a hallucination and a "real" impression? For whether an impression is a real one or a hallucination is decided by majority.

If we look into a stereoscope we have the complete perception of depth, but we say it is an illusion because we can control the sense of right by the sense of touch. But who knows whether, if we had another sense, we would not call all our present reality illusory? Our dreams are not caused by the ordinary stimulation, yet the sensations in our dreams have often all the vividness of those in normal life. We rule them out as unreal, not on account of their deficient properties in quality and intensity, but for their lack of logical consistency. Where they are consistent we are often not able to draw a sharp line of demarcation between dreams and ordinary life. Suppose a man dreamed nightly of the same persons and situations so that a certain consistency prevailed in his dreams; whereas in his waking hours he were placed continuously in the audience of ventriloquists, sleight-of-hand men, conjurors, and other magicians. If this were to go on for some time would not that man take his dreams as reality, and his real life as vexatious illusion? Who, then, guarantees to us that what we call real life, impressions caused by normal stimulation, is anything more than a consistent dream, and who guarantees to us that what we call our dreams is not reality made inconsistent by an nnseen enchanter?

Most people assume that when a man is dead he has no longer any sensations. But we do not know that. We know only that his body does not give any indication of such. The fact that tinder ordinary circumstances the existence of sensations is conditioned by physical stimuli, the presence of sense organs, etc., does not give us a right to conclude that sensation necessarily depends upon them. We reach such a conclusion simply by induction, and induction never carries with it absolute certainty. From the most exact scientific standpoint we must admit that states of consciousness are possible without stimulus, without sense organs, without a human body at all.

In every fact we notice an element which cannot be ex-plained. From the point of view of causal connection every state of consciousness is a miracle, for the so-called physical causes are just sufficient to explain the physical effects but nothing more. The sensations and emotional elements out of which the psychical world is built up are thrown in gratuitously. There has never been discovered the slightest really necessary relation between a sensation and its accompanying physiological processes, or the physical stimulus, and it lies in the very nature of the distinction between physical and psychical that such necessary relation will never be discovered. Thus a sensation without proper stimulation is, in the last instance, not more miraculous than one with it; it is only less customary. It is, indeed, per-plexingly uncustomary to see the intellectual and emotional world of a man magically changed by a mere word of command from another man. But even these events are different only in degree from others which we experience every day.

Between the hypnotized person who eats a turnip for an apple, swims across a dry floor, and experiences severe pain from imaginary pepper thrown into his eyes, * and the ordinary normal individual when experiencing a change in the flow of his mental states through the influence of spoken or written words there is only a difference in degree.

All fine art acts through suggestion, and in every case where a multitude or mob is moved it is done by a kind of hypnotism, although it is not the fashion so to call it. That is the reason why the great mass, the mob, (which mostly consists of respectable people and not of mob elements), does such outrageous things for which the individuals composing it would never like to be, and never can be held responsible. The responsibility here lies with the hypnotizer. Whenever a crowd is led to action by a commanding word, gesture, or look, we have a kind of suggestion which is not essentially but only in degree different from the hypnotic. Wherever an orator leads an audience by high sounding words, or artificial pathos, anywhere else than where the mere truth of his argument would lead them, we have a kind of hypnotic suggestion. Also in the process of teaching, the success of the instructor is the greater the more he succeeds in bringing the will of the pupil into blind obedience to his own, that is, the more his influence approaches hypnotic suggestion; and, since not knowledge but only the preliminary conditions can be transferred from the teacher to the pupil, at the point where the latter grasps the new knowledge there is not lacking even an aspect of telepathic suggestion.

What of this telepathy, suggestion without words, gestures, or other signs? This is the most inexplicable part of hypnotic phenomena. But have we not for ages believed in forces which act at a distance? And indeed we have to believe, for we experience them and cannot explain them. All continuity hypotheses have failed, for they can never explain the differences in density, the transformation of movements, and especially the movements of an enantiomorphous character. Atomic theories, also, have failed for they do not solve the difficulty; they divide the great miracle into a large number of microscopically small ones, for each atom has to act at a distance upon the next one. And if it is claimed that the action of atom upon atom is by impact, then we are arguing in a circle, for the laws of impact are explained by elasticity, and elasticity is conditioned on the possibility of deformation, that is, a change in the relation between volume and surface, and the disarrangement of the spatial relations of the particles, which in turn rests on the existence of interstices between these particles.