510. We come next to the movement which is now on the whole dominant, and to which the greatest number of cures may at present be credited. The school of Nancy - which originated with Liébeault, and which is now gradually merging into a general consensus of hypnotic practice - threw aside more and more decisively the supposed "somatic signs" of Charcot, - the phenomena of neuro-muscular irritability and the like, which he regarded as the requisite proof of hypnosis; - until Bern-heim boldly affirmed that hypnotic trance was no more than sleep, and that hypnotic suggestion was at once the sole cause of hypnotic responsiveness and yet was undifferentiated from mere ordinary advisory speech. This was unfortunately too good to be true. Not one sleep in a million is really hypnosis; not one suggestion in a million reaches or influences the subliminal self. If Bernheim's theories, in their extreme form, were true, there would by this time have been no sufferers left to heal.

What Bernheim has done is to cure a number of people without mesmeric passes, and without any special predisposing belief on either side, - beyond a trust in his own power. And this is a most valuable achievement, especially as showing how much may be dispensed with in hypnotic practice - to how simple elements it may be reduced.

"Hypnotic trance," says Bernheim, in effect, "is ordinary sleep; hypnotic suggestion is ordinary command. You tell the patient to go to sleep, and he goes to sleep; you tell him to get well, and he gets well immediately." Even thus (one thinks) has one heard the conjuror explaining "how it's done," - with little resulting hope of emulating his brilliant performance. An ordinary command does not enable an ordinary man to get rid of his rheumatism, or to detest the previously too acceptable taste of brandy. In suggestion, in short, there must needs be something more than a name; a profound nervous change must needs be started by some powerful nervous stimulus from without or from within. Before contenting ourselves with Bernheim's formula, we must consider yet again what change we want to effect, and whether hypnotists have actually used any form of stimulus which was likely to effect it.

511. According to Bernheim we are all naturally suggestible, and what we want to effect through suggestion is increased suggestibility. But let us get rid for the moment of that oracular word. What it seems to mean here is mainly a readier obedience of the organism to what we wish it to do. The sleep or trance with which hypnotism is popularly identified is not essential to our object, for the subliminal modifications are sometimes attained without any trace of somnolence. Let us consider, then, whether any known nervous stimuli, either massive or specialised, tend to induce - not mere sleep or catalepsy - but that kind of ready modifiability, of responsiveness both in visible gesture and in invisible nutritive processes, - for the sake of which hypnosis is in serious practice induced.

512. Now of the external stimuli which influence the whole nervous system the most conspicuous are narcotic drugs. Opium, alcohol, chloroform, cannabis indica, etc, affect the nerves in so many strange ways that one might hope that they would be of use as hypnotic agents. And some observers have found that slight chloroformisation rendered subjects more suggestible (see Appendices). Janet has cited one case where suggestibility was developed during recovery from delirium tremens. Other hypnotisers (as Bramwell) have found chloroform fail to render patients hypnotisable; and alcohol is generally regarded as a positive hindrance to hypnotic susceptibility. More experiment with various narcotics is much needed; but thus far the scantiness of proof that narcotics help towards hypnosis goes rather against the view that hypnosis is a direct physiological sequence from any form of external stimulus.

The apparent resemblance, indeed, between narcosis and hypnosis diminishes on a closer analysis. A stage may occur both in narcotised and in hypnotised subjects where there is incoherent, dream-like mentation; but in the narcotised subject this is a step towards inhibition of the whole nervous energy - the highest centres being paralysed first \ whereas in hypnosis the inhibition of supraliminal faculty seems often at least to be merely a necessary preliminary to the liberation of fresh faculty which presently manifests itself from a profounder region of the self.

513. Next take another group of massive effects produced on the nervous system by external stimuli; - those forms, namely, of trance and cataplexy which are due to sudden shock. With human beings this phenomenon varies from actual death from failure of heart-action, or paralysis, or stupor attonitus (a recognised form of insanity), any of which may result from a mere alarming sight or unwelcome announcement, down to the cataleptic immobility of a Salpêtriere patient, when she hears a sudden stroke on the gong.

Similar phenomena in certain animals, as frogs, beetles, etc, are well known. It is doubtful, however, whether any of these sudden disablements should be classed as true hypnoses. It has not, I think, been shown that in any case they have induced any real responsiveness to control, or power of obeying suggestion; unless it be (as in some Salpêtriere cases) a form of suggestion so obvious and habitual that the obedience thereto may be called part of the actual cataplexy itself. Thus the "wax-like flexibility" of the cataleptic, whose arms remain in the position where you place them, must not be regarded as a readier obedience to control, but rather as a state which involves not a more but a less alert and capable responsiveness of the organism to either external or internal stimuli.

So with regard to animals - crocodiles, frogs, and the like. I hold theoretically that animals are probably hypnotisable and suggestible; and the records of Rarey's horse-taming, etc, seem to point in that direction (see also Zoist cases of mesmerisation of animals in 513 B and Dr. Ltébeault's experiments with infants in 513 C). But in the commoner experiments with frogs, where mere passivity is produced, the resemblance seems to extend only to the lethargic stage in human beings (see Dr. Bramwell's discussion of the subject in 513 A), and what relation that lethargy bears to suggestibility is not, I think, really known; although I shall later on suggest some explanation on psychological grounds.

It seems plain, at any rate, that it must be from stimuli applied to men and not to animals, and from stimuli of a special and localised rather than of a massive kind, that we shall have to learn whatever can be learnt as to the genesis of the true hypnotic control.