194 ROUGH WAYS MADE SMOOTH. 



take up a quarter of a hundredweight upon his little finger, 

 and swing it round his head with the utmost apparent ease, 

 on being told that it was as light as a feather. 'On another 

 occasion he lifted a half-hundredweight on the last joint of 

 his fore-finger as high as his knee/ The personal character 

 of the man placed him above all suspicion of deceit, in the 

 opinion of those who best knew him ; and as Dr. Carpenter 

 acutely remarks, ' the impossibility of any trickery in such a 

 case would be evident to the educated eye, since, if he had 

 practised such feats (which very few, even of the strongest 

 men could accomplish without practice), the effect would 

 have made itself visible in his muscular development.' 

 ' Consequently/ he adds, * when the same individual after- 

 wards declared himself unable, with the greatest effort, to 

 lift a handkerchief from the table, after having been assured 

 that he could not possibly move it, there was no reason for 

 questioning the truth of his conviction, based as this was 

 upon the same kind of suggestion as that by which he had 

 been just before prompted to what seemed an otherwise 

 impossible action.' 



The explanation of this and the preceding cases cannot 

 be mistaken by physiologists, and is very important in its 

 bearing on the phenomena of hypnotism generally, at once 

 involving an interpretation of the whole series of phenomena, 

 and suggesting other relations not as yet illustrated experi- 

 mentally. It is well known that in our ordinary use of any 

 muscles we employ but a small part of the muscle at any 

 given moment. What the muscle is actually capable of is 

 shown in convulsive contractions, in which far more force is 

 put forth than the strongest effort of the will could call into 

 play. We explain, then, the seeming increase of strength in 

 any set of muscles during the hypnotic state as due to the 

 concentration of the subject's will in an abnormal manner, 

 or to an abnormal degree, on that set of muscles. In a 

 similar way, the great increase of certain powers of percep- 

 tion may be explained as due to the concentration of the 

 will upon the corresponding parts of the nervous system. 



