Baillif in his thesis (1878) and Chevillard in his (for spiritualists) very interesting books, tried, by means of various arguments, to uphold the fluidic explanation.  Despine also thought that by its help he had been able to explain the phenomena; but it was Barety who, in the year 1881, first turned general attention in this direction.  According to him, mankind possesses a nerve force which emanates from him in different kinds of streams.  Those coming from the eyes and fingers produce insensibility to pain, while those generated by the breath cause hypnotic conditions.  This nerve force goes out into the ether, and there obeys the laws that govern light, being broken into spectra, etc.

Claude Perronnet has more lately advanced similar views, and his greatest work is now in press.  Frederick W.H.  Myers and Edmund Gurney sympathize with these views, and try to unite them with the mesmerist doctrine of personal influence and their theory of telepathy.  The third champion in England of hypnotism, Prof.  Hack Tuke, on the contrary, sympathizes entirely with the Parisian school, only differing from them in that he has experimented with satisfactory results upon healthy subjects.  In France this view has lately been accepted by Dr. Bottey, who recognizes the three hypnotic stages in healthy persons, but has observed other phenomena in them, and vehemently opposes the conception of hypnotism as a malady.  His excellently written book is particularly commended to those who wish to experiment in the same manner as the French investigator, without using hysterical subjects.

The second counter current that opposed itself to the French neuropathologists, and produced the most lasting impression, is expressed by the magic word “suggestion.”  A generation ago, Dr. Liebault, the patient investigator and skillful physician, had endeavored to make a remedial use of suggestion in his clinic at Nancy.  Charles Richet and others have since referred to it, but Professor Bernheim was the first one to demonstrate its full significance in the realm of hypnotism.  According to him, suggestion—­that is, the influence of any idea, whether received through the senses or in a hypersensible manner (suggestion mentale)—­is the key to all hypnotic phenomena.  He has not been able in a single case to verify the bodily phenomena of grandehypnotisme without finding suggestion the primary cause, and on this account denies the truth of the asserted physical causes.  Bernheim says that when the intense expectance of the subject has produced a compliant condition, a peculiar capacity is developed to change the idea that has been received into an action as well as a great acuteness of acceptation, which together will produce all those phenomena that we should call by the name of “pathological sleep,” since they are only separable in a gradual way from the ordinary sleep and dream conditions.  Bernheim is particularly strenuous that psychology should appear in the foreground of hypnotism, and on this point has been strongly upheld by men like Professors Beaunis and Richet.