Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/503

THE PROBLEMS OF HYPNOTISM. 491 some faculties and not others ; e.g., colour-blindness may supervene while the hearing remains perfect ; and even in the deeper state of trance, ideas, and especially commands, may be impressed on the ' subject's ' mind. What do we gain then by employing a general term to describe such special effects? ^Y^aen once the chandelier-metaphor is abandoned when once it is recognised that in a multitude of cases the quantity of attention turned on in one direction is in no way connected with a withdrawal from any other the idea of a common psychic factor seems out of place and misleading. The ' subject's ' ear wakes while his eye sleeps ; so in ordinary paralysis the right side may feel while the left does not ; and it does not then occur to us to talk about the patient's attention being asleep on the left side and concen- trated on the right. And now we must make a sudden transition, from the theories which have unduly magnified psychic functions in hypnotism, to those which have unduly ignored them, and have substituted the shibboleths of physical reflex action and automatic cerebration for that of attention. If we trace the natural logical route of the subject, we shall see that a time was almost bound to arrive when a purely physical ac- count of the whole range of phenomena would be attempted. Up to the time of Braid's death, no serious question seems to have been raised as to the relation of consciousness to the hypnotic manifestations. No doubt, at any rate, was ex- pressed as to the presence of consciousness in those higher phenomena which belong to the lighter stage of the trance, and which form by far the most interesting part of the whole subject. Braid himself speaks of ' the extraordinary power of concentration of thought,' ' the rapt contempla- tion,' ' the glowing scenes and images ' presented to ' the fervid imaginations ' of his patients. But the very fact of tracing the observed phenomenon, as he did, to a peculiar physical condition must lead on to the question how far the psychical factors of consciousness and volition are really involved in them at all, and how far the suggested idea has any true existence in the ' subject's ' mind. Granting that his attention has to be directed in the first instance to the monotonous process by which the state is produced, we have seen that the power of attention might naturally be expected to be paralysed by that very process, so as not to survive when the state is once reached ; and we have seen that, if the ' alert stage ' is not caught and used, this is what actually happens, the gradual dulling of the faculties passing on into