6i8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



Experiments in physics are likewise, in some instances, complicated 

 with experiments with living human beings. Thus in the " Keely 

 motor " and " Winter motor " claims, and in other like devices for the 

 overthrow of the law of the conservation of energy, the apparatus for 

 generating power was in the hands of interested non-experts, who 

 might be capable of either willful or self-deception — for the purposes of 

 science it matters not which — and no satisfactory experiment could be 

 made unless these possibilities of error could be eliminated. 



The temporary success of cundurango was almost entirely the re- 

 sult of self-deception of those who, under the mingled emotions of hope, 

 despair, and expectation, availed themselves of it. It is impossible to 

 introduce any drug or system of treatment for cancer, or any other 

 grave disorder, amid great pomp and noise, and under the patronage 

 of honored names, without at least relieving, for the time, a certain 

 proportion of cases ; and practically it is of little import what the drug 

 or remedy may be, if only the confidence of the sufferers is assured. 



Men not only of general but of special experimental ability are con- 

 stantly going far out of the way in scientific research through want of 

 simple knowledge of the laws and phenomena of the involuntary life — 

 a branch of physiology which, though of extreme interest and overflow- 

 ing in suggestion, is so young and recent in its development that it is 

 not yet taught in colleges or schools. The published monographs of 

 the late Mr. Braid, of Manchester, show indisputably that their author 

 was not without a certain genius for scientific research ; but in all his 

 philosophizing on the effects of fixed attention and straining of the 

 eyes in the production of what has been known as hj^notism he missed 

 utterly the discovery, or even the suspicion, of the great fact that 

 trance, of which hypnotism is but one of numberless phases, was a sub- 

 jective not an objective condition — existing in the subject's own brain 

 — and that the manoeuvrings by which he was wont to excite it were 

 but one of infinite devices for acting upon the mind ; thus Mr. Braid 

 failed to solve the problem of trance. Similarly Professor Czermak — 

 one of the inventors of the laryngoscope — though he made many ex- 

 periments in the production of hypnotism in animals, likewise con- 

 founded the subjective with the objective, and did not arrive at the 

 true explanation of his own experiments. Indeed, from the time of 

 Mesmer down, all or nearly all the scientific studies and attempted scien- 

 tific studies of trance, in any of its multiform phases, have been made 

 valueless by this same non-recognition of the involuntary life, of which 

 trance is the extreme expression. Confounding the subjective with the 

 objective vitiates nearly all human philosophy. 



Similarly Mr. Edison, in his experiments with those highly interest- 

 ing phenomena that he supposes to indicate a new force, was so far 

 misled by the muscular contractions of the tongue when applied to a 

 block of iron, through which the suspected force was passing, as to 

 •conclude that an objective influence was acting, whereas, after the ele- 



