533. The extirpation of tumours, however, is not the only purgative process which the bodily organism ever needs. And the psychical organism also - to continue our metaphor - is subject to many blockings and cloggings which it would be well to disperse if we could. The treasure of memory is mixed with rubbish; the caution which experience has taught has often been taught too well; philosophic calm has often frozen into apathy. Plato would have the old men in his republic plied well with wine on festal days, that their tongues might be unloosed to communicate their wisdom without reserve. "Accumulated experience," it has been said with much truth in more modern language,1 "hampers action, disturbs the logical reaction of the individual to his environment. The want of control which marks the decadence of mental power is [sometimes] itself undue control, a preponderance of the secondary over the primary influences".

Now the removal of shyness, or mauvaise honte, which hypnotic suggestion can effect, is in fact a purgation of memory, - inhibiting the recollection of previous failures, and setting free whatever group of aptitudes is for the moment required. Thus, for the boy called on to make an oration in a platform exhibition, hypnotisation sets free the primary instinct of garrulity without the restraining fear of ridicule. For the musical executant, on the other hand, a similar suggestion will set free the secondary instinct which the fingers have acquired, without the interference of the learner's puzzled, hesitating thoughts.

I may remark here (following Gurney and Bramwell) how misleading a term is mono-ideism for almost any hypnotic state. There is a selection of ideas to which the hypnotic subject will attend, and there is a concentration upon the idea thus selected; but those ideas themselves may be both complex and constantly shifting, and indeed this is just one of the ways in which the hypnotic trance differs from the somnambulic - in which it may happen that only a relatively small group of brain-centres are awake enough to act. The somnambulic servant-girl, for instance, may persist in laying the tea-table, whatever you say to her, and this may fairly be called mono-ideism; but the hypnotic subject (as Bramwell has justly insisted, see 534 A) can be made to obey simultaneously a greater number of separate commands than he could possibly attend to in waking life.

1 Dr. Hill, British Medical Journal, July 4th, 1891.

534. From these inhibitions of memory, - of attention as directed to the experiences of the past, - we pass on to attention as directed to the experiences of the present. And here we are reaching a central point; we are affecting the macula lutea (as it has been well called) of the mental field. Many of the most important of hypnotic results will be best described as modifications of attention.

Any modification of attention is of course likely to be at once a check and a stimulus; - a check to certain thoughts and emotions, a stimulus to others. And in many cases it will be the dynatnogenic aspect of the change - the new vigour supplied in needed directions - which will be for us of greatest interest. Yet from the inhibitive side also we have already had important achievements to record. All these arrests and destructions of idées fixes, of which so much has been said, were powerful modifications of attention, although the limited field which they covered made it simpler to introduce them under a separate heading.

And even now it may not be without surprise that the reader finds described under the heading of inhibition of attention a phenomenon so considerable and so apparently independent as hypnotic suppression of pain. This induced analgesia has from the first been one of the main triumphs of mesmerism or hypnotism. All have heard that mesmerism will stop headaches; - that you can have a tooth out "under mesmerism " without feeling it. The rivalry between mesmerism and ether, as anaesthetic agents in capital operations, was a conspicuous fact in the medical history of early Victorian times. But the ordinary talk, at any rate of that day, seemed to assume that if mesmerism produced an effect at all it was an effect resembling that produced by narcotics - a modification of the intimate structure of the nerve or of the brain which rendered them for the time incapable of transmitting or of feeling painful sensations. The state of a man's nervous system, in fact, when he is poisoned by chloroform, or stunned by a blow, or almost frozen to death, or nearly drowned, etc, is such that a great part of it is no longer fit for its usual work, - is no longer capable of those prolongations of neurons, or whatever they be, which constitute its specific nervous activity.

We thus get rid of pain by getting rid for the time of a great deal of other nervous action as well; and we have to take care lest by pushing the experiment too far we get rid of life into the bargain. But on the other hand, a man's nervous system, when hypnotic suggestion has rendered him incapable of pain, is quite as active and vigorous as ever, - quite as capable of transmitting and feeling pain, - although capable also of inhibiting it altogether. In a word, the hypnotic subject is above pain instead of below it.

To understand this apparent paradox, we must reflect for a moment on the probable origin and meaning of pain. The human organism, as the Darwinian analysis has shown us, may be roughly said to consist of a complex of ingenious but imperfect mechanisms designed to enable our race to overrun the earth. As competition has become more severe, fresh artifices have been developed to enable our ancestors to secure food and to avoid danger. Pain is a warning of danger, useless to the protozoon or to the stationary vegetable, but indispensable to active creatures with miscellaneous risks. Yet as intelligence advances and nerves at the same time grow more sensitive, pain becomes but a mixed advantage. It is well to be warned (say) not to touch the fire; but a neuralgia's constant signal of mal-nutrition tends simply to exhaust the sufferer and to hinder its own cure. What we want to do now is to choose our capacities of pain; to shut off pain when we know it will be useless; to rise as definitely above it as our earliest ancestors were below it, or as the drunken or narcotised man is below it now. Nay, if one counts weariness and wakefulness along with pain, one may say that the suppression of pain and the suppression of microbes have become the two main physical needs of the human race.

With noxious microbes hypnotic suggestion can only indirectly deal; but with pain and weariness it can deal more directly and successfully than any other agency whatever. It attacks the real origo mali; - not, indeed, the pressure on the tooth-nerve, which can only be removed by extraction, but the representative power of the central sensorium which converts that pressure for us into pain. It diverts attention from the pain, as the excitement of battle might do; but diverts it without any competing excitement whatever. The battle-excitement (so to say) pours so much water out through pipe A that there is none left to flow through pipe B; the hypnotic suggestion simply shuts a cock on pipe B, and leaves pipe A to flow or not, as may be convenient. For some fortunately susceptible persons, such as I have seen, this power of suppressing pain and weariness simply abolishes the main troubles of life at a blow. The drawback is that for many persons the process is a tedious one, or cannot with our present knowledge be performed at all.

Hypnotic suggestion is not yet a panacea; but it is much nearer to being a panacea than anything else has ever been; and it works on the only plan from which a panacea can possibly be developed.

To this topic of influence on attention we shall have to recur again and again. For the present it may suffice if I refer the reader to a few cases - chosen from among some thousands which have been printed, from the Zoist downwards, in more or less detail, where mesmeric and hypnotic practice has removed or obviated the distress or anguish till now unmistakably associated with various bodily incidents - from the extraction of a tooth to the great pain and peril of childbirth (see Appendices).