Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/495

THE PROBLEMS OF HYPNOTISM. 4S3 physiological condition of preparatory nervous adjustment to a regularly-recurring stimulus is really fixation in as true a sense as where the employment of muscular apparatus more immediately suggests the word. Concentration of at- tention is, no doubt, the natural mental concomitant of the physical fixation ; it may even be that for the artificial pro- duction of the state in man it is a real condition, in the sense that physical fixation alone would not be effective if the attention were kept actively employed on external topics. But Braid never for a moment suggested that the peculiar muscular or nervous strain could in the first instance be dis- pensed with, or was anything less than the fall and sufficient cause of the subsequent phenomena. He is throughout consistent and urgent in his view that the basis of hypno- tism is a complete alteration or rebalancing of the nervous .em, artificially producible by special means of an ob- viously physical sort. Here, then, we seem to have at any rate the beginning of a satisfactory account of many of the facts popularly attri- buted to ' mesmeric ' influence. Braid clearly saw what Dr. Carpenter has failed to see that the hypnotic state is a unique one and is due to a quite special cause. If the fact is experimentall}* established that a particular sort of physi- cal process is perpetually followed by an exceptional mental state having no apparent relation to it, the hypothesis of an exceptional nervous change as a middle term, and as the proximate condition of the mental state is one which, in the present stage of our knowledge as to the connexion be- tween mind and nerve-tissue, we not only may but must make. And so far as the mental change is profound and the mental state unique, to that extent, we are justified in saying, is the nervous change profound and the nervous state unique. Even to enunciate this doctrine may appear somewhat out of date, now that science is attempting to define, what Braid left uncertain, the exact nature of the nervous events whether, for instance, they consist in ' cor- tical inhibition ' or in ' local erethism '. But there is a special reason for constantly insisting on the more general position. For Dr. Carpenter's is by no means the only at- tempt that has been made to frame an explanation of hyp- notic phenomena out of psychical factors ; and such factors have proved themselves peculiarly liable to illegitimate use. Above all, the}* have tended to confuse the important dis- tinction between the production of the state and the state itself a distinction which Braid's conception enables us to keep clear.