ARTIFICIAL SOMNAMBULISM. 203 



Strive to imitate my writing, so that those who should read 

 the letter should mistake it for mine (I knew he could do 

 so). He did this ; our stratagem succeeded, and the sleep 

 was produced just as it would have been by one of my own 

 letters. 



It is hardly necessary to say, perhaps, that none of the 

 phenomena of hypnotism require, as indeed none of them, 

 rightly understood, suggest, the action of any such occult 

 forces as spiritualists believe in. On the other hand, I 

 believe that many of the phenomena recorded by spiritual 

 ists as having occurred under their actual observation are 

 very readily to be explained E.S phenomena of hypnotism. 

 Of course I would not for a moment deny that in the great 

 majority of cases much grosser forms of deception are em- 

 ployed. But in others, and especially in those where the 

 concentration of the attention for some time is a necessaiy 

 preliminary to the exhibition of the phenomena (which 

 suitable 'subjects' only are privileged to see), I consider 

 the resulting self-deception as hypnotic. 



We may regard the phenomena of hypnotism in two 

 aspects first and chiefly as illustrating the influence of 

 imagination on the functions of the body ; secondly, as 

 showing under what conditions the imagination may be 

 most readily brought to bear in producing such influence. 

 These phenomena deserve far closer and at the same time 

 far wider attention than they have yet received. Doubt has 

 been thrown upon them because they have been associated 

 with false theories, and in many cases with fraud and de- 

 lusion. But, rightly viewed, they are at once instructive 

 and valuable. On the one hand they throw light on some 

 of the most interesting problems of mental physiology; on 

 the other they promise to afford valuable means of curing 

 certain ailments, and of influencing in useful ways certain 

 powers and functions of the body. All that is necessary, it 

 should seem, to give hypnotic researches their full value, is 

 that all association of these purely mental phenomena with 

 charlatanry and fraud should be abruptly and definitely 



