The Attraction of the Unknown - The Forty History of Mesmerism - Some Control-experimente - Natural Sleep and Hypnotic Sleep - Hypnotism of Animals - The Follies of Telepathy and of ' Animal Magnetiim'

The unknown has always had a great attraction for every class of mind, and whoever promises to lift for us the veil of the mysterious and to afford us a glimpse into the unknown world may always count upon a large following. It is the infirmity of great minds as of small. The poet, the mystic, the imaginative philosopher, share its higher privileges; the charlatan, the quack, and the stage performer, its greater profits. There is one phase of the pursuit of the unknown, and one method of manipulating it, which has had the privilege of exciting the interest and inflaming the imagination of mankind in all periods of history, in every phase of civilisation, and in every part of the world; probably even amongst prehistoric peoples, and certainly amongst aboriginal savages. It is the endeavour to search out hidden forces and mysterious qualities of the mind - to discover other methods of transmitting mental impressions than those of sight, speech, and touch; other avenues than those of the five senses; and other means of mental influence than those everywhere known and visible. It is with this quest, and with some of its ancient vestiges and strange modern developments, that I purpose to deal.

Hypnotism, which is now the subject of much intelligent and well-directed modern research, and is also, unfortunately, the plaything of a class of wandering stage performers, is the lineal descendant of many ancient beliefs. It was known to the earliest races of Asia and amongst the Persian Magi; and to this day the Yogis and Fakirs of India throw themselves into a state of hypnotic ecstasy and reverie by fixation of gaze. In many convents of the Greek Church it has been practised since the eleventh century, as it is still by the Omphalopsychics, by whom hypnotic reverie is obtained by steadily gazing at the umbilicus. Modern hypnotism, mesmerism, telepathy, animal magnetism, thought-reading, or thought-transference, are of the family which in earlier times, and when men were less wont to analyse natural phenomena by rational methods, brought forth the practices of the Magians, the antics of the demoniacs and the possessed, the expulsion of evil spirits by exorcism, the healing of the king's-evil by laying on of hands, the serious acceptance and judicial punishment of the hallucinations of the witches, and the fantastic cruelty of the witch-finders. The proceedings by which Sarchas, the faithful companion of Apollonius, gave sight to the blind, movement to the paralysed, hearing to the deaf, and reason to the insane, were essentially methods of what we should now call'suggestion'; and the application of the influence of suggestion to persons in the most various mental and physical states, whether of health or disease, will serve to throw light on some of the most tragic, blood-stained, picturesque, and incredible pages of history, as well as on a multitude of stage tricks and quack procedures which are just now, as they have been at frequent intervals during the last century, much in vogue.

But first of all I must summarise some of the related facte in the physiology of the brain, and give a little of my own personal experience as an investigator, an experience which led me to take special interest in the subject.

1 An Address delivered in Toynbee Hall.

Very early in life I was brought into contact with a well-known physician, the late Dr. Elliotson, who, unfortunately for himself, was victimised by two characteristic specimens of that kind of hysterical impostors who delight in deceiving investigators of mesmerism, hypnotism, spiritualism, and the like, and whose great object is to become either centres of interest and notoriety or to make money. Although a very able and earnest man, Dr. Elliotson was completely entrapped and deceived by two women named Okey, who were patients of his in University College Hospital.

They made him believe that when he had thrown them into what was called the mesmeric sleep, they coould read letters placed in a sealed envelope on the surface of their bodies, their eyes being previously carefully bandaged. Although the trick was thoroughly exposed by the late Mir. Wakdey, coroner for Middlesex, and Dr. Elliotson had to retire from University College Hospital, he had seen enough of the actual and indubitable phenomena of induced sleep which he was able to produce, to lead him to devote the rest of his life to the endeavour to employ this means of inducing sleep, as a curative agent. He attended a very near and dear relative of mine who was suffering from a chronic and painful affection of the joints, which murdered rest. He was successful in giving her sleep at nights; and this striking demonstration of an actual power, which, if not resident in, was at least connected with his method of practice, not only made me grateful to him, but sufficed to impel me, when later I-entered into the medical profession, to test his methods. I very soon found that in a large number of cases there is no difficulty whatever in producing what we may call, though not very accurately, artificial sleep.

I found that I oould produce it easily and frequently by means of what were then called mesmeric passes, with the hands or by desiring the patient to look fixedly at my eyes; and, at first, following the directions of Elliot-son and of his master Meaner, I at the same time exercised my will, and 'willed' the patients whom I mesmerised, to sleep. Just at this time there were springing up two other methods of exciting this artificial condition, one being widely known as Braidism, because it was practised by Dr. Braid, and the other as electro-biology - a name which had, I believe, been first given to it in America about 1848, by a New Englander named Grimes. The latter had been lee tared on, under the title of Electrical Psychology, in 1850, by Dr. Dodds, before the Congress of the United States, in reply to a semi-official invitation from some members of the Senate. These lectures had been pub-lished, under the title of the 'Philosophy of Electrical Psychology/ in New York, and been disseminated in England in 1850, when I first took to studying the subject, by Dr. Darling and others, amongst whom Dr. B. W. Carpenter, Sir James Simpson, Sir Henry Holland, and Sir David Brewster are perhaps the best-known personages.