The terms "animal magnetism" and "mesmerism" must be handed over to the fluid theory.

One can term that science, which embraces all the phenomena connected with conceived and unconceived suggestion Hypnotism (Braid). Hypnosis is best defined as the altered condition of the mind of a hypnotized person, and especially during the suggestive sleep. Bcrnheim1 defined hypnosis as "a particular psychical condition, which one can produce, and in which the suggestibility is increased." The Hypnotist is the person who produces the condition of hypnosis in another. One can also call him "Dictator." By suggestion (dictation) one means the production of a dynamic change in the nervous system of a person, or of such functions which depend on his nervous system, by another person by means of the calling forth of representations (be they conceived or unconceived) that such a change is taking place, has taken place, or will take place. This is in accordance with the teaching of the Nancy school. Verbal suggestion, or "persuasion," may be taken to express suggestion produced by spoken words. Suggestibility is the individual susceptibility toward suggestions. Many persons are extremely suggestible even in the waking condition (suggestive condition during wakefulness). The conception of hypnosis in this respect can scarcely be limited, since the normal condition of these people during waking passes by imperceptible degrees into the condition of hypnosis. Every one is, however, to a certain extent suggestible during the period of waking. Autosuggestion is the suggestion which a person produces consciously or, as is more common, unconsciously in himself (Bernheim).

1 Bernheim, Congres de physiologie psychologique.

The conceptions "suggestion," and especially "autosuggestion," can easily merge by means of a too great expansion into the conceptions, impulse, intuition, belief, automatism, and the like. As a matter of fact, the differentiation becomes difficult. The conception of suggestion can be more sharply limited by including the actively moving, suggesting hypnotist (the linking of one person to another, or the rapport). Still, if the hypnotist acts unconsciously - as when someone else is suggested by my yawning - or if the suggestion is produced by some object - object-suggestion of Schmidkunz- - the conception of this condition merges already into that of autosuggestion. The latter, therefore, runs the risk of being expanded in such a way as would lead to misunderstandings and false interpretation of former truisms and investigations.

It is almost as difficult to differentiate the conception of suggestion from that of the influencing of people by other persons, by logic, argument, thoughts, reading, etc., for a sharp line of demarcation does not exist. One could narrow down suggestion to the limits of intuitive influencing, in contradistinction to the influencing through reasoning; but that which appears to us to be influencing on logical grounds generally depends much more on feelings of sympathy and antipathy, on personal trust, on the tone or the convincing manner of speaking, than on the real intrinsic value of the reasons, so that even here the suggestive element has crept in unnoticed. The higher plasticity of reason, which adapts itself to the other powers in an extremely delicate way, often forms a resistance against suggestion. The brain automatisms themselves, which we scarcely recognize, or do not recognize at all, are the factors which, dissociated (as in a dream), loosened, and again having become plastic, obey more or less blindly the insinuating strange command in suggestion. And thus the conception of suggestion merges into the conception of intuition, in which, as is well known, feelings and pictures of imagination play a leading part.

Suggestion and hypnosis, taken as phenomena and energies, are as old as the human race, and phylogenetically much older, since they occur also in the animal kingdom. But only two acquired factors are new: (1) The advent of the recognition of the phenomena, of their causes, the condition on which they rest, their importance in the consciousness of human beings, and especially of the scientific man. This is no longer, as it was formerly, a dubious mystery, but is now a scientific truth. (2) The astonishing ease with which hypnosis can be produced in nearly every person by means of Liebeault's method.

Both these factors lend a new therapeutic and forensic importance to hypnotism.