THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BELIEF. 225 



maintained in India under the circumstances described, for a 

 much longer period than in this country, may be fairly attributed 

 to the warmth of the tropical soil ; which will prevent any con- 

 siderable reduction of the temperature of the body buried in it, 

 notwithstanding the almost entire suspension of its internal heat- 

 producing operations. Again, it has been experimentally ascer- 

 tained that even warm-blooded mammals, whose hybernation is 

 profound, can be kept under water for an hour or more without 

 injury ; although, in their ordinary condition of activity, they 

 would be killed by a submersion of three or four minutes. And 

 thus there is nothing, in the almost complete privation of air, 

 that militates against the probability that the buried fakeer might 

 remain enclosed in a narrow vault, without suffering from the 

 want of it ; for the nearly complete suspension of all the functions 

 of life will reduce the demand for air, as for food, almost to zero. 



But, secondly, there is to the well-informed physiologist no 

 inherent improbability in the self-induction of this curious con- 

 dition. For, in the first place, he has the standard case of Colonel 

 Townsend, which no medical authority has ever ventured to call 

 in question, so high was the authority of Dr. Cheyne, the eminent 

 physician by whom it was recorded. And Mr. Braid, in the course 

 of his experiments on that form of artificial somnambulism which 

 he termed hypnotism, met with several cases (of which I myself 

 saw more than one) in which the self-induction of that state pro- 

 duced a marked lowering of the pulse and respiration ; the reduc- 

 tion being such in one instance as seriously to alarm Mr. Braid, 

 and to necessitate the immediate termination of the experiment. 



The inherent improbability of the asserted phenomena, then, 

 being thus weakened or even removed by scientific inquiry, we 

 are free to attach whatever weight to the testimony in their favour 

 we may think it deserves on its own account. And I long since 

 expressed my own conviction, that though we may scarcely 

 accept that testimony as affording a satisfactory basis for positive 

 assurance, we have no right whatever to refuse to believe it. 1 he 

 case seemed to me to be one fairly calling for that " suspension 

 of the judgment," which our great Faraday used to advocate, as 

 preferable in many instances to that premature " making up of 

 our minds," which often involves either our /^«-making them 



