August i i, 1892] 



NATURE 



36: 



by the term " Psychologie Physiologique, " which had been 

 used at Paris as the name of their first Congress, and he thought 

 " Experimental Psychology " more appropriate. In laboratory 

 work the leadership was taken by Germany ; in hypnotism 

 France was our master and Germany our colleague. He was 

 glad to see some of the leaders of the Nancy School with them 

 that day, as he thought they were taking the broader lines in 

 the subject, and that Europe was certainly not inclined on the 

 whole to narrow the subject. He would not attempt to discuss 

 the larger questions at that time, but would confine himself to 

 the harmless task of explaining the arrangements that were pro- 

 posed. In the morning meetings the Congress would be divided 

 into two sections, of which Section A would be devoted to 

 neurology and psycho-physics, and Section B to hypnotism and 

 cognate questions ; in the afternoon there would be general 

 meetings. 



The address was very warmly received, and Prof. A. Bain, in 

 reading the first paper took the opportunity of expressing his 

 gratitude to Prof. Sidgwick and the secretaries for the energy 

 they had shown in bringing together such a large group of men 

 who were glad to make each other's acquaintance. He went on 

 to read an interesting paper on the advantages in psychology of 

 introspection on the one side and experiment on the other, and 

 the ways in which one could help the other. Prof. Charles 

 Richet went on to discuss some of the possible prospects of 

 psychology, and to express a hope that some of the most diffi- 

 cult subjects, such as thought-transference and clairvoyance, 

 might be helped by the minute study of the process of develop- 

 ment of the human mind. Prof. Gruber (of Roumania) then 

 gave a very vivid sketch of the remarkable association of colour 

 with sound, which he had spent many years in observ- 

 ing. To a very small number among his best educated patients 

 the sound of the vowel " e " was accompanied by a sensation of 

 yellow colour, of "i" by blue, of "o" by black, and so on 

 through the long list of the Roumanian vowels and diphthongs, 

 and also to some extent with numbers. The same colour was 

 not always induced by the same sound in different patients, but 

 the observations had been carefully tested. Prof. Pierre Janet 

 related in detail a long case of complete loss of memory for pre- 

 sent events and complete incapacity for any decision {Taboulie) 

 which had been suddenly brought about by the foolish jest (on 

 August 28, 1 891) of telling her what was not true, viz. that her 

 husband was dead. The most curious points were that the loss 

 of memory extended backwards as far as July 14, 1891, i.e. of 

 what had happened during the six weeks before the accident, 

 though the natural memory was complete up to July 14, and the 

 patient's sub-conscious memory of all that had happened after that 

 could be easily demonstrated by her automatic writing and by 

 unconscious speech in a normal or hypnotic sleep. Prof. Eb- 

 binghaus, in criticizing the paper, remarked that the woman's 

 state seemed best explained as a condition of such complete 

 distraction by things without that she had no power to attend to 

 things within. Mr. Myers cited a case described by the elder 

 Despine in 1830, in which there was a description of double 

 memory and double personality such that the woman in the 

 second state could eat and drink like a drayman, but soon 

 reverted with no memory to her first state, and asked pitifully 

 for her usual four teaspoonfuls of arrowroot. 



Next day Section A and Section B went to work separately. 

 In Section A Prof. Henschen (Upsala) read a paper which 

 attracted considerable attention and consisted in a very careful 

 examination of the exact tract of the visual path in man through 

 the brain from the eye to the visual centre in the cortex of the 

 calcarine fissure. It was admitted that it was not in accordance 

 with the results of physiological experiments on animals ; but 

 the arguments for its proof in man were considered quite 

 sufficient. Prof. Horsley followed with a paper on the degree 

 of Localization of movements and correlative sensations, which 

 roused some discussion ; and then Prof. Schafer brought forward 

 careful experiments to show that there was no valid reason to 

 attribute any intellectual powers to the prefrontal lobes of the 

 brain ; and Dr. Waller ended the work of the morning by illus- 

 trating the difficulties of accurately defining the functional attri- 

 butes of the cerebral cortex. 



In Section B Prof. Liegeois read a paper which M. Liebeault, 

 of Nancy, had written along with him describing a case of 

 suicidal monomania, which they had succeeded in curing by 

 hypnotic suggestion. The President expressed himself much 

 interested in the paper, and regretted that they could not see 

 Liebeault among them, for he was a man who, after twenty-five 

 years of contempt, had succeeded in making the world realize 

 NO. II 89, VOL. 46] 



some new methods. Dr. Frederic van Eeden (Amsterdam) read 

 a careful report of his five years' experience of the medical cases 

 of hypnotism along with Van Renterghem in Amsterdam. He 

 laid stress on the care which should be taken to avoid the dis- 

 trust and prejudice caused by the abnormal facts of hypnotism 

 in public exhibitions. With the upper classes he thought 

 hypnotism more difficult than with the lower, for they objected, 

 rightly, to a tone of command. Psycho-therapy with them must 

 guide and support, but not command, and that it would do so 

 even to the extent of curing some organic disease he regarded 

 as well proved. Virchow's cellular pathology had neglected the 

 psychical forces of the living cell. Now that these were 

 acknowledged some principles of the old vitalism must revive. 

 Prof. Bernheim read another more technical paper on hysterical 

 amaurosis, explaining it as a purely psychical state brought about 

 by suggestion, with which Dr. Berillon could not agree, bat Prof. 

 Bernheim replied that there was nothing abnormal in hypnotism ; 

 there was no difference between normal and hypnotic sleep, 

 though the two states were produced by different means. 

 Further, there was not necessarily any sleep in hypnosis. It 

 was a pity for that reason that the word had been chosen, for 

 hypnotism meant simply suggestibility. Prof, Delboeuf 

 took a similar view ; to hypnotize a man was only 

 to persuade him that he could do something that 

 he thought he could not do. Supposing the man 

 thought he had a pain, to hypnotize him was to make him sure 

 he had not. Dr. Berillon preferred to define hypnotism as the 

 psychical state in which the cerebral control had been taken 

 away artificially, and the patient became an automaton for any 

 use. Such automatism was not in any way necessarily injurious 

 to the subject, and was certainly useful in some diseases. 



In the general afternoon meeting there were elaborate 

 theories of colour perception well explained to the Congress 

 both by Prof. Ebbinghaus and by Mrs. C. L. Franklin ; 

 I and Prof. Lloyd Morgan attempted the difficult task of 

 I defining the limits of animal intelligence, chiefly as shown 

 by the dog, whom he was sorry not to be able to credit with as 

 much power of introspection as many of his friends. After some 

 j slight discussion on this. Dr. Bramwell (of Goole) brought for- 

 ward four subjects from Yorkshire, on whom he showed some of 

 the common phenomena of hypnotism and related some of his 

 experiences in recent medical practice, which he had been able 

 to show to doctors in Leeds and elsewhere, e.g. that he had been 

 able in a few cases to produce by hypnotism, at a time when the 

 patient seemed fully awake and normal, a state of local anaes- 

 thesia to allow a dentist to extract seven double teeth without 

 any pain to the patient. 



On Wednesday morning, in Section A, Prof. Heynaus (of 

 Copenhagen) read a paper on the relation of Weber's law to the 

 phenomena of the inhibition of presentations ; Dr. Mendelssohn 

 (St. Petersburg) on the parallel law of Fechner ; Dr. Verricst 

 (Lou vain) on the physiological basis of rhythmic speech ; and 

 M. Binet (Paris) on the psychology of insects, showing that in 

 the Coleoptera the dorsal nervous centres were motor and the 

 ventral sensory. In Section B Prof. Delboeuf pointed^out the 

 remarkable power of the somnambulist in judging of the length 

 of passing time without any watch or instrument. He had found 

 some simple Belgian countrywomen when hypnotized able to 

 carry out suggestions at any time he liked to name from 300 to 

 3000 minutes, and he thought the subject deserved further in- 

 quiry. Prof. Hitzig (Berlin) brought forward a minute and 

 careful physiological study of some attacks of sleep which had 

 some resemblance to hypnotic conditions. — Mr. F. W. H. Myers 

 showed from the reports drawn up by Mr. Kenlemans, Mrs. 

 Verrall, and two other experimenters of some experience that in 

 some cases, though probably only in a few, it was possible to 

 induce hallucinations by such an experiment as crystal vision, 

 i.e. the purely empirical process of looking steadily into a 

 crystal or other clear depth or at a polished surface. These 

 externalized images or quasi-percepts illustrated some little 

 known points in conscious and sub-conscious memory. Prof. 

 Pierre Janet corroborated Mr. Myers's results by some 

 of his own, in which, for instance, dreams which had 

 been manifest to the onlooker but unknown to the 

 sleeper were brought within the sleeper's knowledge by 

 gazing on a bright surface or by the essentially similar 

 process of automatic writing. In the afternoon the President 

 presented a very long report of careful detail of a census of hal- 

 lucinations which had been agreed upon at the Congress in 

 Paris in 1889, and which had been carried out in England by 

 himself, in America by Professor William James, and in France 



