HYPNOTISM. 609 



arrived European the fences are so aggressively present as 

 to spoil enjoyment. 



Messrs. Gurney, Janet, and Binet Lave shown that the 

 ignored elements are preserved in a split-off portion of the 

 subjects' consciousness which can be tapped in certain ways, 

 and made to give an account of itself (see Vol. I. p. 209). 



Hypercesthesia of the senses is as common a symptom as 

 anaesthesia. On the skin two points can be discriminated 

 at less than the normal distance. The sense of touch is so 

 delicate that (as M. Delboeuf informs me) a subject after 

 simply poising on her finger-tips a blank card drawn from 

 a pack of similar ones can pick it out from the pack again 

 by its ' weight.' We approach here the line where, to many 

 persons, it seems as if something more than the ordinary 

 senses, however sharpened, were required in explanation. 

 I have seen a coin from the operator's pocket repeatedly 

 picked out by the subject from a heap of twenty others,* 

 by its greater ' weight ' in the subject's language. — Audi- 

 tor}! hyperaesthesia may enable a subject to hear a watch 

 tick, or his operator sj^eak, in a distant room. — One of the 

 most extraordinary examples of visual hyperaesthesia is 

 that reported by Bergson, in which a subject who seemed 

 to be reading through the back of a book held and looked 

 at by the operator, was really proved to be reading the im- 

 age of the page reflected on the latter's cornea. The same 

 subject was able to discriminate with the naked eye details 

 in a microscopic preparation. Such cases of ' hyperaesthe- 

 sia of vision ' as that reported by Taguet and Sauvaire, 

 where subjects could see things mirrored by non-reflecting 

 bodies, or through opaque pasteboard, would seem rather 

 to belong to ' psychical research ' than to the present cate- 

 gory. — The ordinary test of visual hyperauiiteness m hyp- 

 notism is the favorite trick of giving a subject the hallu- 

 cination of a picture on a blank sheet of card-board, and 

 then mixing the latter with a lot of other similar sheets. 

 The subject will always find the picture on the original 

 sheet again, and recognize infallibly if it has been turned 



* Precautions being taken against differences of temperature and other 

 grounds of suggestion. 



