Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/606

have formed the basis of all psychical cures ever since. How the sleep can be produced by another was seen in the experiments of Braid, where one appreciates fully that the person really hypnotizes himself by gazing at an object. The full understanding between hypnotized and hypnotist has never been really understood, and so here we are stopped short.

The theory of Dr. Hudson may put us on the right track. Because it is so convenient a theory and tends to make plausible a number of things which otherwise could not be understood, I am going to take the liberty of detailing it here. Dr. Hudson claims that every normal person is possessed of two minds, a subjective one and an objective one. The objective mind is the one we use every day, a mind fully capable of forgetting and the only one of which we are ordinarily cognizant. The subjective mind is the perfect mind wherein are stored up all the numerous thoughts that have ever come into it, there lying dormant, only to be reawakened when a new set of associations brings them forth.

It is this mind which we may say is used in hypnotism, in somnambulism, the one which shows itself in altered personality and in various other abnormalities. Some authors consider this the subliminal or subconsious mind.^[1]

That there is another mind far more perfect and which brings to our recollection many things forgotten, seems to be an undisputed fact. When a drug like Cannabis Indica is used or when a person is drowning, there come before his mind's eye, in a single moment, the doings of years. And so in some recorded cases of trance states the same thing is proved. A highly interesting case is given by Mr. Coleridge in his 'Biographica Literaria.'

Mr. Coleridge says:

It occurred in a Roman Catholic town in Germany, a year or two before my arrival at Göttingen, and had not then ceased to be a frequent subject of conversation. A young woman of four or five and twenty, who could neither read nor write, was seized with a nervous fever, during which, according to the asseverations of all the priests and monks of the neighborhood, she became possessed and as it appeared, by a very learned devil. She continued incessantly talking Latin, Greek and Hebrew, in very pompous tones, and with a most distinct enunciation. This possession was rendered more probable by the known fact that she was, or had been, a heretic. The case had attracted the particular attention of a young physician, and by his statement, many eminent physiologists and psychologists visited the town and cross-examined the case on the spot. Sheets full of her ravings were taken down from her own mouth and were found to consist of sentences, coherent and intelligible each for itself, but with little or no connection with each other. Of the Hebrew, a small portion only could be traced to the Bible; the remainder seemed to be in Rabbinical dialect.

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1. One can not help realizing that this theory will never be fully accepted. Most psychologists are still quarreling over concepts, and no two will agree as to what is meant by a subjective or an objective mind.