bered which are forgotten in the waking state.[1] This is normally the case with a person who has been previously and recently mesmerized. He may then remember little else than what took place in the corresponding stage of his previous mesmerization. In a certain state, then, an event or a command will produce in the central nervous system those changes which are necessary for the event or the command to be remembered later, without ever rising to consciousness in the waking condition. Thus, a command to do a particular thing, given to a subject in this mesmeric stage, may be carried out when he awakes, although he is quite unconscious why he does it. We may say that such an act is one of unconscious memory. But it is, I think, something more than this. The subject is usually uneasy and preoccupied until the thing is done; he is, to a greater or less extent, unable to fix his attention on other things; he is, in fact, in a state of unconscious attention to an unconscious memory. This brings us to our point. It suggests that if a subject, in a certain stage of mesmerization, be told that in a few days a sore will appear upon his hand, or, conversely, that a sore already there will disappear, the conditions which accompany conscious expectation and attention will, to a certain degree, be established; and the trophic influence of the nervous system on the tissues may be tested in a manner which puts the experiment fairly within the control of the observer, and, to a certain degree, excludes imposture. Such an experiment has obviously some drawbacks: it would probably only succeed, if it succeeded at all, with a person whose nervous system was in a state of unstable equilibrium; and it can hardly be expected that the effects would be so striking as when conscious expectation is also concerned. Still, observations of this kind are well worth attention, on account of the medical, the physiological, and the psychological issues involved in the results.
Here I must leave the subject. I have not attempted to give an account of all the phenomena of mesmerism; I have taken those phenomena which seemed to me to be the least easy to understand, the most liable to misconception, and have attempted to show that they resemble fundamentally certain simpler phenomena which can be observed in lower animals. I have further attempted to string together the various facts upon a thread of theory, which may be briefly summed up as follows:
The primary condition of mesmerism is an inhibition of a particular mode of activity of the cortex of the brain, in consequence of which the will can no longer be made effective.
- ↑ A case is recorded by Braid, of a woman who, during natural somnambulism—which is almost identical with a state that can be produced by mesmerism—could repeat correctly long passages from the Hebrew Bible, and from books in other languages, although she had never studied any of these languages, and was quite ignorant of them when she was awake. At length, however, it was discovered that she had learned the passages when she was a girl, by hearing a clergyman with whom she lived read them out aloud.
