The" International Congress of Experimental Payahology
has been meeting this week, and no doubt the full reports of some of the papers and discussions will prove to be very in- teresting ; but there is not much nutriment in the abbreviated accounts of the daily newspapers. The hypnotists have had the most interesting subject ; but though their facts are wonderful, and ought to shed a new light on psychology, so far as we see, what they have hitherto shed upon it, is a new darkness. Take, for instance, M. Deboeuf's remarkable feats as imported in Wednesday's Times, and his astonishing inference from those feats. For example, he relates the story of a woman who was under a maniacal temptation to murder those dearest to her, and whom he assured that she could not and would not be haunted by that fear within given limits of time, which he gradually enlarged, till she was haunted by this homicidal mania no longer; and thereupon, the Professor infers, "the conclusion was that in hypnotism there was hardly anything more than the word hypnotism." Surely, with deference to Debceuf, that is nonsense. What is the difference between the man who can persuade his patients to believe what he himself hardly believes,—what at most he only ventures to hope,—and the man who can do nothing of the kind ? What is the difference between the kind of disease which can be -conquered by this method, and the kind of disease which can- -not P What is the difference between the patient who is susceptible to this influence, and the patient who is not? All this, medical theory ought to explain, and if it could explain, it would tell us something of hypnotism. At present, not one man in a hundred or a thousand can get rid of so much as a toothache by impressing himself with the notion that it is going away; and very likely the one man in a thou- sand who can do so, could not do it without the express encouragement of some person of unique organisation.
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