Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/415

402 E. GUBN.EY : notiser was not really concentrating his mind in the manner supposed. This fact seems explicable only on the hypothesis that, when the effect is produced, some cause is at work beyond the ostensible cause of verbal and physical sugges- tion ; and the cause which, on the grounds of analogy and of parsimony of assumptions, at once presents itself is surely no other than mental suggestion telepathic, even though the two persons are in the same room, as being transferred otherwise than through the recognised channels of sense, and carrying with it the impulsive quality, which now involves the further development into trance, as in other cases it involves the further development into hallucination. In this way that inscrutable something which has been described as specific ' mesmeric ' power would reduce itself (for the cases in question) to identity with the more com- prehensible and general sort of telepathic ' agency ' ; and its peculiar effect on the ' subject ' is simply a pushing on into an extreme form in the direction of least resistance, which is here determined as that of hypnotic trance by the pre-esta- blished sensitiveness to this particular idea. Such an agency is no longer specific in the sense of being an occult mode of influence which a few specially endowed persons have always at command, and can bring to bear at a moment's notice on any favourable ' subject ' ; it receives its specialisation at the receiving not at the transmitting terminus. " But," the ' mesmerists ' might object, " does not this view of the hypnotic cases ignore the palpable fact of the rapport ? Is it not mere juggling with words to deny any specific quality to ' mesmeric ' agency, if the rapport which puts the ' agent ' in connexion with the ' subject,' and which has been mesmerically established, remains specific ? And how can that description be denied to it if, as usually happens, each of the two persons concerned is indispensable to the other if A can at that particular time be entranced by the suggestion of no one in the world except B, and B's suggestion can at that particular time entrance no one in the world except A?" Now, in the first place, a certain ambiguity lies in the word rapport. When A's thought or sensation has been trans- ferred to B, we may say, if we like, that A and B were in rapport ; but this is merely to coin a useless definition, and to throw away a useful word, unless we mean by rapport something which is different from the transference, and which has conditioned the transference. Taking this latter sense, I have no doubt that such a thing as hypnotic rapport exists, and I have no objection to the word specific