He may be induced to become a homicide, an incendiary, or suicide, and all these impulses deposited in his brain during sleep become forces silently stored up, which will burst forth at a given moment with the precision, accuracy of performance and automatic impetuosity of acts performed by the really insane.

'Gentlemen, bear this well in mind; all these acts, all these phenomena unconsciously accomplished, are no mere vague apprehensions and vain suppositions; they are real facts which you may meet with every day of ordinary life. They are prone to develop, and to appear around you and before you in the most inexplicable manner.' 1

In many places Dr. Luys cautions his pupils against the dangers that may arise if hypnotic patients fall into the hands of unscrupulous persons. The hypnotised patient he describes as malleable, flexible and obedient in a completely passive fashion. 'You can,' he says, page 193, et seq., 'not only oblige this defenceless being incapable of resistance to make you a manual gift, but to sign a promise, a bill of exchange, to write a holograph will in your favour, and to hand it you without his ever knowing what it contains or even that it exists. He will accomplish the most minute legal formalities calmly and serenely, so that the most experienced officers of the law would be deceived. Here is Esther. She will write and sign before you a deed of gift in my favour good for a thousand francs. Her writing is as good in her hypnotised as in her wakeful state, perhaps firmer and less hesitating. You could make her swallow, as you see, a bread pill, thinking it to be a peppermint lozenge; if it were a capsule containing morphine, and she was to be awakened as the victim of poisoning, she would know nothing of the origin of her symptoms. If I tell Marie to throw herself out of the window, she rushes to the window like an arrow from a bow, pushing aside violently those who try to stop her.

If she were found dead in the street, who could say whether it were suicide or homicide?' . . . ' It is not necessary that an individual should present the classic stages of the greater hypnotism in order that he should be made to receive and to execute a suggestion; the slightest and most superficial condition suffices--simple fascination. The hypnotic under the influence of suggestion is capable of becoming a dangerous lunatic of a new kind.' M. Luys also says, not without a certain inconsistency, ' no one is obliged to allow himself to be hypnotised, and the fact of having delivered over to another even for a single instant his moral liberty, suffices, in my opinion, to create a certain measure of responsibility.' Dr. Luys is careful to recommend to his pupils always to give the suggestion to the persons whom they hypnotise not to allow themselves to be hypnotised by anyone else, in order to avoid such subjects becoming the subject of exploitation by interested persons.

1 Lecons oliniques sur les principauae Phenomenes de l' Hypnotisme dons leurs Rapports avec la Pathologic Mentals. Par J. Luys. Paris: Georges Carre, editeur, 58 Rue St. Andre-des-Arts, 1890.

Fig. 23. - Esther in the normal state.

Fig. 24. - Esther suddenly and profoundly alarmed by the luminous radiation of a bottle cork.

This recommendation, highly significant as it is cannot be considered to be of any great value. A subject accustomed to be thrown into the hypnotic state cannot protect himself, and is at the mercy of any scoundrel or impostor who chooses to adopt the various methods of impressing the imagination which are the stock-in-trade of all hypnotisers. It is a mere idle fancy, easily disproved, that the hypnotiser has in himself any power special to him. All of M. Luys's subjects who passed under my hands, and indeed every subject who for many years has come under my notice, could be hypnotised, as I have already stated, by me or by anybody else whom they thought capable of hypnotising them; or by any object whatever - a candle, a bell, a spoon, a coin, or a tuning fork - to which they were taught to impute hypnotising power. In the substituted jargon of other schools this is called mesmeric power or magnetic power; all empty phrases for concealing the fact that the condition is one of a subjective character, capable of being induced by many kinds of external stimulus. M. Luys's porter, his ward servant, myself, and my friends proved to be as capable of hypnotising as Dr. Luys is himself.

The dangers which he so vividly described are not therefore to be conjured by the simple expedient on which he relies. I may add that the newspapers in France abound with sad stories, and others are current in the hospitals of most distressing and grossly immoral results of this abominable practice of training responsible beings to resign their responsibility, and to become the passive agents of the will of others.