238 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The possibilities of posthypnotic suggestion would seem at 

 first glance to open a wider field for criminal suggestion, but tbe 

 evidence does not, I think, justify much apprehension on that 

 score. 



When the patient's consciousness is much disordinated by the 

 suggestion, he is usually unable to co-ordinate himself to his envi- 

 ronment, and is, of course, not fitted to do anything requiring 

 alert mental powers, much less a crime. When the suggested 

 idea expels inconsistent states the case is almost as bad. Prof. 

 Li^geois dissolved a white powder in water and told Mme. 



C , one of his patients, that it was arsenic. "I said to her: 



*See M. D , he is thirsty, he is always wanting something 



to drink ; you will offer him this.' ' Yes, monsieur.' But D 



asked a question which I had not foreseen ; he asked what was 

 in the glass proffered him. With a candor which set aside all 



thought of simulation, Mme. C replied, 'It is arsenic.'" 



Clearly it would not do to intrust to Mme. C the execution of 



a suggested crime. 



Again, when the emergence of the posthypnotic suggestion 

 does not affect the upper consciousness at all but coalesces with 

 it, it is apt, as I have already pointed out, to meet with resistance 

 from the patient's habitual principles of conduct. Dr. De Jong 

 reports that a little Jewish girl of ten, whom he found very sug- 

 gestible, repeatedly obeyed his posthypnotic suggestion that she 

 should steal a piece of money left lying upon the table, but one 

 Saturday she disobeyed. When asked why, she said : " It is the 

 Sabbath day ; I can not touch money." Another of his patients 

 performed all manner of make-believe crimes at his suggestion, 

 but, when he suggested something the performance of which 

 would have shocked her modesty, she refused, and she refused 

 also to betray a trivial secret which he had got his cook to con- 

 fide to her. 



When one contrasts cases of this sort (and they are common) 

 with the long series of " laboratory crimes " recorded in the 

 annals of hypnotic literature — murder committed with sugared 

 water, with a roll of newspaper, with an unloaded pistol, the 

 theft of purely imaginary objects, or of articles obviously the 

 property of the man who suggests that they be stolen, etc. — it is 

 difiBcult to avoid the conclusion that for evidential purposes such 

 experiments are almost worthless. And in the few cases where 

 it seems probable that the patient has really committed what he 

 believes to be a crime, it is often not shown that the crime would 

 have been especially abhorrent to his normal self. This objection 

 attaches, I think, to one of the most striking cases on record, 



recently reported by Prof. Lidbeault. A certain Dr. X and 



himself gave a young fellow of seventeen or eighteen years of 



