554. In passing on from the influence of suggestion on attention to its influence on will, I am not meaning to draw any but the most everyday distinction between these two forms of inward concentration. The point, in fact, which I wish now to notice is rather a matter of common observation than a provable and measurable phenomenon. I speak of the energy and resolution with which a hypnotic suggestion is carried out; the ferocity, even, with which the entranced subject pushes aside the opposition of much more powerful men. I do not, indeed, assert that he would thus risk very serious injury; for I believe (with Bramwell and others) that there does exist somewhere within him a knowledge that the whole proceeding is a mere experiment. But, nevertheless, he actually risks something; he behaves, in short, as a confident, resolute man would behave, and this however timid and unaggressive his habitual character may be. I believe that much advantage may yet be drawn from this confident temper. We can thus inhibit the acquired self-distrust and shyness of the supraliminal self, and get the subliminal self concentrated upon some task which may be as difficult as we please; - which may, if we can adjust it rightly, draw out to the uttermost the innate powers of man.

We can command - sometimes with success - clairvoyant excursions; nay, we may order - not without some hope - even action upon matter at a distance. Among his experiments with the subject referred to in 573 C, Dr. Backman records a case in which, during one of her clairvoyant excursions, he had tried to make her seize and shake a bunch of keys which she had observed in the room she was clairvoyantly visiting. It was afterwards ascertained that there really was a bunch of keys in the place as described, though it did not appear that the desired movement had taken place.1 Still, if "telekinesis" be (as I hold) a reality, such experiments as these seem, at any rate, a reasonable way of trying to achieve it.

One direction, at any rate, in which a beginning can be made is the attainment of control over muscles not habitually subject to will, whether from ancestral disuse, or as belonging to the unstriped or "involuntary" type. Various movements of this kind may be made as the result of suggestion; and I may add here that when a definite type of action is set before several hypnotised subjects a spirit of emulation will often carry them far. A singular illustration of this may be drawn from the very phenomena which Charcot used to cite in order to prove an almost opposite thesis; - the thesis, namely, that the subject was an obedient automaton, and that in order to prove hypnosis, - to demonstrate "le grand hypnotisme," at any rate, - there must needs occur some muscular phenomena incapable of being simulated by the subject. And in effect, in his once famous "three stages," there did sometimes occur certain neuro-muscular phenomena which no one in an ordinary waking condition could reproduce. Yet it by no means follows hence that these are phenomena inevitably accompanying the trance, or in themselves beyond the range of the subliminal will of the subject.

On the contrary, I rather take these Salpêtrière phenomena as showing us how much the subliminal will of entranced subjects is capable of achieving. I believe that these women wished to be hypnotised, and wished to go through the "classical stages," and wished in the course of these often-described stages to perform evolutions which should attract admiring attention. What one really saw exhibited was not the powerful will of the hypnotiser, but the still more powerful will of the hysteric.

555. It is not indeed in the Salpêtrière school alone that there has been much confusion of thought as regards the will-power and general independence of the hypnotised subject. It has been supposed that the mere fact of being hypnotised tended to weaken the will; that the hypnotised person fell inevitably more and more under the control of the hypnotiser, and even that he could at last be induced to commit crimes by suggestion (see 555 A). A few quotations from Dr. Milne Bramwell, given in 555 B, will show on how small a foundation of fact these fanciful theories have been erected. It may suffice to say here that nothing is easier, either for subject or for hypnotiser, than to avert undue influence. A trusted friend has only to suggest to the hypnotised subject that no one else will be able to affect him, and the thing is done. As to the crimes supposed to be committed by hypnotised persons under the influence of suggestion, the evidence for such crimes, in spite of great efforts made to collect it and set it forth, remains, I think, practically nil.

1 See Dr. Backman's paper in the Proceedings S.P.R., vol. vii. p. 207.

This fact, I must add, is quite in harmony with the views expressed in the present chapter. For it implies that the higher subliminal centres (so to term them) never really abdicate their rule; that they may indeed remain passive while the middle centres obey the experimenter's caprice, but are still ready to resume their control if such experiment should become really dangerous to the individual. And this runs parallel with common experience in the spontaneous somnambulisms. The sleeper may perform apparently rash exploits; but yet, unless he be suddenly awakened, serious accidents are very rare. Nevertheless, both in spontaneous and in induced somnambulism, accidents may occur; nor should any experiment be undertaken in a careless or jesting spirit.

But the role of the hypnotiser, as our command over hypnotic artifice increases, is likely to become continually smaller in proportion to the role played by the subject himself. Especially must this be so where the object is to strengthen the subject's own power of will. All that can be done from without in such a case is to imbue the man's spirit with the sense of its unexhausted prerogatives, - the strength which he may then employ, not only to avert pain or anxiety, but in any active direction which his original nature itself admits.