< An Experimental research (continued from page 11-291) >
I awoke her, as before, she showed the same incredulity and would not believe that she had been asleep or unconscious for any length of time. I then drew up the sleeve and showed her the needle, when she surrendered at discretion and to her own advantage.
This lady belonged to a family of nervous temperament, where gout and functional nervous disturbances were prominent features of the medical history, the father having suffered from apoplexy due to gouty arteries, while the mother, over eighty years of age, though healthy, had always shown herself, to possess a delicate nervous organisation. My patient and her sisters were known to me to be good subjects from whom to obtain reliable information, both on account of their physical peculiarities and from the implicit reliance I might place upon any matter relating to facts falling within the limits of their observation.
After I had tried my first experiment I asked my patient to hold out her hand, which trembled so much in the exercise of her daily avocations that she could hardly write a letter or hand a cup of tea or an egg without throwing it off the saucer or jerking it out of the egg-cup. A few passes along her arm, assuring her at the same time that she was about to be relieved of the distressing symptom which I have described, and which had been present for years, were followed by almost complete relief, and she, to the astonishment of the rest of the family circle, handed me my tea that evening with almost as little shake in her hand as there was in my own.
Dominance having been obtained over this lady, she was very quickly relieved of wakefulness which was a source of great exhaustion, her sleep being often nil or limited to a very short space of time. After a few trials she would, on being settled in bed for the night, be asleep before I counted the thirty seconds which I had fixed as the limit within which she should fall asleep.
After this treatment her health greatly improved, and during the following summer, when she stayed with us on a visit for a while in the south of England, she became a strong healthy woman.
I do not for a moment feel inclined to deny that all or any of the directive activity for the government of the vaso-motor and nutrition centres, upon the influence of which the improvement in this case principally depended, was derived from her own organization, for such I believe to have been the case. I also am prepared to acknowledge that the act of falling into the mesmeric trance was also brought about by an influence from within, as in the case of falling asleep at word of command within thirty seconds, but I maintain that in the first instance she was already asleep with her eyes closed, and that an extra conscious influence was then exerted. I am aware of the explanation that has been offered in such oases to account for the phenomena, while at the same time acknowledging the veracity of the subject operated on, who professes to have been perfectly ignorant of any active movements on the part of the operator.
The explanation that the movement of the arm before the eye of the unconscious hypnotised individual will induce certain actions on his part, might be pressed to account for the fact of my patient having been mesmerised in her sleep, on the assumption that her eyelids were but half-dosed, and that she unconsciously perceived and organically registered the movements executed by me and which, from her recognition (unconscious!) of the fact that they were similar to the motions executed by another, who had mesmerised her on a former occasion, were the physical signs of an order to fall into the trance state, an order which she obeyed, falling from one state of unconsciousness into another and deeper one, and quite specific in its character.
This class of explanation may suit physiologists enamoured of their own theories, but it does not hold water for a moment in face of the varied and peculiar experience I possess of these and allied matters.
Granting that the girl was asleep and that she told the truth, my nervous system conveyed to hers a message to act in a certain way, a way best known* to the interacting centres themselves, but the molecular details of which neither I nor my subject knew anything about, any more than the babe unborn.
What my nervous system does to set up the hypothetical vibration is a matter as far beyond my knowledge and will as the movements of the fingers of the basket-maker, from whom the Queen of England might order a dozen ornamental flower holders, are from hers. The details are not presented to the administrative faculties whose function is to deal with affairs in там, leaving the working out of the process by which such orders are carried out to an executive agent <... continues on page 11-293 >
* The word know is of course here used in a transcendental sense, since knowledge and even feeling, below consciousness, can only prove their existence to consciousness in the general argument where Design is the subjective aide of the law· of the whole physical Universe.