THE PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF MESMERISM. 809 



bered which are forgotten in the waking state.* This is normally the 

 case with a person who has been previously and recently mesmerized. 

 He may then remember little else than what took place in the cor- 

 responding stage of his previous mesmerization. In a certain state, 

 then, an event or a command will produce in the central nervous sys- 

 tem those changes which are necessary for the event or the command 

 to be remembered later, without ever rising to consciousness in the wak- 

 ing condition. Thus, a command to do a particular thing, given to a 

 subject in this mesmeric stage, may be carried out when he awakes, 

 although he is quite unconscious why he does it. We may say that 

 such an act is one of unconscious memory. But it is, I think, some- 

 thing more than this. The subject is usually uneasy and preoccupied 

 until the thing is done ; he is, to a greater or less extent, unable to fix 

 his attention on other things ; he is, in fact, in a state of unconscious 

 attention to an unconscious memory. This brings us to our point. It 

 suggests that if a subject, in a certain stage of mesmerization, be told 

 that in a few days a sore will appear upon his hand, or, conversely, 

 that a sore already there will disappear, the conditions which accom- 

 pany conscious expectation and attention will, to a certain degree, be 

 established ; and the trophic influence of the nervous system on the 

 tissues may be tested in a manner which puts the experiment fairly 

 within the control of the observer, and, to a certain degree, excludes 

 imposture. Such an experiment has obviously some drawbacks : it 

 would probably only succeed, if it succeeded at all, with a person 

 whose nervous system was in a state of unstable equilibrium ; and it 

 can hardly be expected that the effects would be so striking as when 

 conscious expectation is also concerned. Still, observations of this 

 kind are well worth attention, on account of the medical, the physio- 

 logical, and the psychological issues involved in the results. 



Here I must leave the subject. I have not attempted to give an 

 account of all the phenomena of mesmerism ; I have taken those phe- 

 nomena which seemed to me to be the least easy to understand, the 

 most liable to misconception, and have attempted to show that they 

 resemble fundamentally certain simpler phenomena which can be ob- 

 served in lower animals. I have further attempted to string together 

 the various facts upon a thread of theory, which may be briefly summed 

 up as follows : 



The primary condition of mesmerism is an inhibition of a 2yarticu- 

 lar mode of activity of the cortex of the brain, in consequence of which 

 the will can no longer be made effective. 



* A case is recorded by Braid, of a woman who, during natural somnambulism — which 

 is almost identical with a state that can be produced by mesmerism — could repeat cor- 

 rectly long passages from the Hebrew Bible, and from books in other languages, although 

 she had never studied any of these languages, and was quite ignorant of them when she 

 was awake. At length, however, it was discovered that she had learned the passages 

 when she was a girl, by hearing a clergyman with whom she lived read them out aloud. 



