Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/237

224 E. GUENEY : facts being simply that the distant operator wills that the ' subject ' shall be entranced, and that in consequence he is entranced, without any middle term of mental sugges- tion or anything else. This hypothesis underlies much that has been written about the relation of will-power to mesmerism ; and has been strongly suggested in our own day in much of the language used about "psychic force". It is what Schopenhauer advocated in his description of " the magnetic or generally magical influence proceeding from .intentional willing " ; l for he speaks of this will- influence as " toto genere different from every other"; and this although he seems to have encountered and fully admitted certain facts of mental suggestion proper, having in the preceding sentence spoken of communicated (tele- pathic) dreams, and of community of thought between mesmeriser and ' subject '. The view clearly involves nothing less than a complete breach in the physical order. The psychical cause and the physical effect on the organism of another person are as completely dispa- rate as my resolve to kick a chair over and the fallen chair, while no physical nexus, parallel to the kick, exists between them. Or rather, since the changes in B's organism, being matters of intimate physiology, are changes which A, who is supposed to cause them, knows and thinks nothing about, what he is supposed to do is precisely analogous to building a stone wall at a distance from where one is standing by an exercise of the will which involves no idea of moving the stones. Schopenhauer, indeed, might be able to conceive this as "an actio in distans which the will, certainly proceeding from the individual, yet performs in its metaphysical quality as the omnipresent substratum of the whole of nature ". But we are not all Schopenhauers ; and those who are unable to reach the substratum of nature with his clue, and to whom even his " will of the world " appears something of a will-o'-the-wisp, may feel the difficulty here propounded in relation to the individual will to be a serious one. I do not pretend, however, that the theory of "psychic force," as opposed to that of mental suggestion, need be held in this extreme metaphysical form. The distant effect might be referred to A's volition in virtue, not of its " magi- cal influence," but of the cerebration which accompanies it ; and either (1) the cerebral events involved in B's trance 1 The World as Will and Idea (Halclane and Kemp's translation), vol. iii., p. 76.