undo it. What new resistance is this? What voice this time told the soul not to obey you? What has taken place in this brain, so suggestible until now? And presently a change in the order of the words, in the tone of the voice, removes the spell. How so? Suppose it were not removed? Might it have remained, in spite of the hypnotizer's command? Here are mysteries, real mysteries, and les savants improvisés do not even suspect them to exist." M. Delboeuf speaks truly: Herr Schmidkunz indeed is not a savant improvisé, and his book certainly does not ignore the mystery; yet with all its copiousness and ingenuity, it hardly advances our knowledge a single step. Why do 'mind-curers' so often excite the 'imagination' to heal the body, when regular practitioners fail, with their far more impressive incantations and paraphernalia? Whence are these obstinate 'auto-suggestions' which thwart those of the hypnotizer? The truth is, that all the more distinctive phenomena of suggestion run dead against the ordinary laws of belief and practice. Why does a man who holds his own obstinately against every opponent in all the ordinary arguments of life submit to everything you tell him after he has made himself passive for a minute and you have performed a little hocus-pocus of passes over his face? The philosophy of the subject probably lies in the direction of Messrs. Myers's, Binet's, and Janet's researches into the different strata of which personality consists. The hypnotic stratum must be thrown uppermost, as in the trance; or in some way the suggestion must penetrate to it and tap it, or there will be no effect. What the stratum is in itself is a mystery. Mr. Myers's recent notion that hysteria is a disease of it seems a promising one. Our author would seem to regard it as a sort of overlaid ancestral deposit. It may be that; but Myers's various essays on the automatic life, alterations of personality, etc., in the Physical Research Society's Proceedings, are a far more effective attempt at getting to close quarters with it than anything in Dr. Schmidkunz's pages. Dr. Schmidkunz does not seem to know even Myers's name. To revert to our first characterization of his book, — it is admirably humane and unprejudiced, and gives an impression of decided originality of mind; but it is distractingly diffuse and inconclusive.
In this volume we have the realization of the promise made by the author in the preface to the second edition of the first part of his Handbook of Psychology — "Senses and Intellect." As was to have
