Though no distinction between mesmerism and hypnotism is taken in popular language, ‘mesmerism’ is a word implying this theory of ‘magnetic’ or other unknown personal influence.  ‘Hypnotism,’ as will presently be seen, implies no such theory.  The Academy’s Report (1831) attested the development, under ‘magnetism,’ of ‘new faculties,’ such as clairvoyance and intuition, also the production of ’great changes in the physical economy,’ such as insensibility, and sudden increase of strength.  The Report declared it to be ‘demonstrated’ that sleep could be produced ‘without suggestion,’ as we say now, though the term was not then in use.  ’Sleep has been produced in circumstances in which the persons could not see or were ignorant of the means employed to produce it.’

The Academy did its best to suppress this Report, which attests the phenomena that Hegel accepted, phenomena still disputed.  Six years later (1837), a Committee reported against the pretensions of a certain Berna, a ‘magnetiser.’  No person acted on both Committees, and this Report was accepted.  Later, a number of people tried to read a letter in a box, and failed.  ‘This,’ says Mr. Vincent, ’settled the question with regard to clairvoyance;’ though it might be more logical to say that it settled the pretensions of the competitors on that occasion.  The Academy now decided that, because certain persons did not satisfy the expectations raised by their preliminary advertisements, therefore the question of magnetism was definitely closed.

We have often to regret that scientific eminence is not always accompanied by scientific logic.  Where science neglects a subject, charlatans and dupes take it up.  In England ‘animal magnetism’ had been abandoned to this class of enthusiasts, till Thackeray’s friend, Dr. Elliotson, devoted himself to the topic.  He was persecuted as doctors know how to persecute; but in 1841, Braid, of Manchester, discovered that the so-called ’magnetic sleep’ could be produced without any ‘magnetism,’ He made his patients stare fixedly at an object, and encouraged them to expect to go to sleep.  He called his method ‘Hypnotism,’ a term which begs no question.  Seeming to cease to be mysterious, hypnotism became all but respectable, and was being used in surgical operations, till it was superseded by chloroform.  In England, the study has been, and remains, rather suspect, while on The Continent hypnotism is used both for healing purposes and in the inquiries of experimental psychology.  Wide differences of opinion still exist, as to the nature of the hypnotic sleep, as to its physiological concomitants, and as to the limits of the faculties exercised in or out of the slumber.  It is not even absolutely certain that the exercise of the stranger faculties—­for instance, that the production of anaesthesia and rigidity—­are the results merely of ‘suggestion’ and expectancy.  A hypnotised patient is told that the middle finger of his left hand will become rigid