and incapable of sensation.  This occurs, and is explained by ‘suggestion,’ though how ‘suggestion’ produces the astonishing effect is another problem.  The late Mr. Gurney, however, made a number of experiments in which no suggestion was pronounced, nor did the patients know which of their fingers was to become rigid and incapable of pain.  The patient’s hands were thrust through a screen; on the other side of which the hypnotist made passes above the finger which was to become rigid.  The lookers-on selected the finger, and the insensibility was tested by a strong electric current.  The effect was also produced without passes, the operator merely pointing at the selected finger, and ‘willing’ the result.  If he did not ‘will’ it, nothing occurred, nor did anything occur if he willed without pointing.  The proximity of the operator’s hand produced no effect if he did not ‘will,’ nor was his ‘willing’ successful if he did not bring his hand near that of the patient.  Other people’s hands, similarly situated, produced no effect.

Experiments in transferring taste, as of salt, sugar, cayenne pepper, from operator to subject, were also successful.  Drs. Janet and Gibert also produced sleep in a woman at a distance, by ‘willing’ it, at hours which were selected by a system of drawing lots.[17] These facts, of course, rather point to an element of truth in the old mesmeric hypothesis of some specific influence in the operator.  They cannot very well be explained by suggestion and expectancy.  But these facts and facts of clairvoyance and thought-transference will be rejected as superstitious delusions by people who have not met them in their own experience.  This need not prevent us from examining them, because all the facts, including those now universally accepted by Continental and scarcely impeached by British science, have been noisily rejected again and again on Hume’s principles.

The rarer facts, as Mr. Gurney remarks, ’still go through the hollow form of taking place.’  Here is an example of the mode in which these phenomena are treated by popular science.  Mr. Vincent says that ’clairvoyance and phrenology were Elliotson’s constant stock in trade.’ (Phrenology was also Braid’s stock in trade.) ’It is a matter of congratulation to have been so soon delivered from what Dr. Lloyd Tuckey has well called “a mass of superincumbent rubbish."’[18] Clairvoyance is part of a mass of rubbish, on page 57.  On page 67, Mr. Vincent says:  ’There are many interesting questions, such as telepathy, thought-reading, clairvoyance, upon which it would be perhaps rash to give any decided opinion....  All these strange psychical conditions present problems of great interest,’ and are only omitted because ’they have not a sufficient bearing on the normal states of hypnosis....’  Thus what was ‘rubbish’ in one page ‘presents problems of great interest’ ten pages later, and, after offering a decided opinion that clairvoyance is rubbish, Mr. Vincent thinks it rash to give any decided opinion.  It is rather rash to give a decided opinion, and then to say that it is rash to do so.[19]