503. Mesmer's experiment was almost a "fool's experiment," and Mesmer himself was almost a charlatan. Yet Mesmer and his successors, working from many different points of view, and following many divergent theories, - have opened an ever-widening way, and have brought us now to a position where we can fairly hope, by experiments made no longer at random, to reproduce and systematise most of those phenomena of spontaneous somnambulism which once seemed to lie so tantalisingly beyond our grasp.

That promise is great indeed; yet it is well to begin by considering precisely how far it extends. We must not suppose that we shall at once be subduing to our experiment a central, integrated, reasonable Self. On the contrary (as has already been explained in Chapter III (Genius)., section 304), it has been characteristic of hysteria and usually also of somnambulism that the spontaneous changes, although subliminal, have been piecemeal changes; that (to adopt Hughlings-Jackson's well-known phraseology) they have involved not highest-level but middle-level centres; not those centres which determine highest perception and ideation, but centres which control complex co-ordinated movements, such as the synergies necessary for walking or for sight or for dreamlike unintelligent speech.

This metaphor of higher and lower, although it may sound inappropriate, is still of service when we are dealing with stages of faculty all of them ex hypothesi below the level of the conscious threshold. For our general evidence as to subliminal processes has by this time obliged us to assume that there exists in that submerged region also a gradation of somewhat similar type. We may reach by artifice (that is to say) some subliminal faculty, and yet we may not be reaching any central or controlling judgment. We may be reaching centres which exercise over those subliminal faculties only a fragmentary sway; so that we shall have no reason for surprise if there be something dreamlike, something of bizarrerie or of incoherence, in the manifestation which our experiment evokes. We must be content (at first at any rate) if we can affect the personality in the same limited way as hysteria and somnambulism have affected it; but yet can act deliberately and usefully where these have acted hurtfully and at random.

It is enough to hope that we may inhibit pain, as it is inhibited for the hysteric; or concentrate attention, as it is concentrated for the somnambulist; or change the tastes and passions, as these are changed in alternating personalities; or (best of all) recover and fix something of that supernormal faculty of which we have caught fugitive glimpses in vision and dream. Our proof of the origination of any phenomenon in the deeper strata of our being must lie in the intrinsic nature of the faculty exhibited; - not in the wisdom of its actual direction. That must often depend on the order given from above the threshold; just as the magic mill of the fable continues magical, although, for lack of the proper formula to stop it, it be still grinding out superfluous salt at the bottom of the sea.

504. I hope that this brief introduction may be of service in two different ways. In the first place, it may show the reader that hypnotism, with its bewildering labyrinth of marvels, has yet a legitimate, an essential, almost a predictable place in experimental psychology. It is no longer possible for the philosopher to relegate it to the physician; - any more than for the physician to relegate it to the quack. It is a discovery which has been achieved almost at random, and which is still used in tentative ignorance; but it is just the kind of discovery which was to be desired and expected; and if it had not come to us in one way, it must, sooner or later, have come to us in another. And in the second place, this preliminary notion of what might be expected from the experimental control of sleep-waking states should prepare the student for what has seemed to many an observer a strange anomaly - the contrast, namely, between the intrinsic potency of the faculties thus evoked and the absurd ends to which (in public exhibitions especially) they often seem to be directed.

We have advanced, so to say, within sight of the great stream of our being, but we must not expect as yet to control more than some eddying backwater or subsidiary channel.

The early history of mesmerism or hypnotism was certain, on these showings, to be but a confused and disjointed story. The achievements of hypnotisers (even when cleared from much needless or exaggerated controversy) are not like a series of parallel advances, all of them arrested by the same obstacle at the same point. Rather they resemble a handful of rapid incursions into an unknown country, each of them more or less successful, but encountering difficulties of various kinds, which no persistent effort is made to overcome. That is to say, the inquiry has been mainly the work of a few distinguished men, who have each of them pushed some useful ideas as far as they could, but whose work has not been adequately supported by successors. I should much doubt whether there have been a hundred men in all countries together, at the ordinary level of professional intelligence, who during the century since Mesmer have treated hypnotism as the serious study of their lives. Some few of the men who have so treated it have been men of great force and strong convictions; and it will be found that there has consequently been a series of sudden developments of groups of phenomena, differing much from each other, but corresponding with the special beliefs and desires of the person who headed each movement in turn.

I will mention some of the chief examples, so as to show the sporadic nature of the efforts made, and the great variety of the phenomena elicited. Such a review should suggest also that if some of those phenomena have seldom been repeated since the burst of novel interest when they were first observed, this by no means proves that they may not again recur if sufficiently sought for. There has not been as yet experience enough for more than a mere beginning in some few of the many directions in which the problem of the limits of suggestion - of the capacity of the subliminal self - must sooner or later be pushed.

505. The first name, then, that must be mentioned is, of course, that of Mesmer himself. He believed primarily in a sanative effluence, and his method seems to have been a combination of passes, suggestion, and a supposed "metallotherapy" or "magneto-therapy" - the celebrated baquet which no doubt was merely a form of suggestion. His results, though very imperfectly described, seem to have been peculiar to himself. The crise which many of his patients underwent sounds like a hysterical attack; but there can be no doubt that rapid improvement in symptoms often followed it, or he would not have made so great an impression on savants as well as on the fashionable world of Paris. To Mesmer, then, we owe the first conception of the therapeutic power of a sudden and profound nervous change. To Mesmer, still more markedly, we owe the doctrine of a nervous influence or effluence passing from man to man, - a doctrine which, though it must assume a less exclusive importance than he assigned to it, cannot, in my view, be altogether ignored or denied.