Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/373

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NOUMENA.
351

mortals would pass unnoticed. We all catch our own name uttered in a conversation to all the rest of which we have been apparently quite oblivious. The exceeding sensibility of the entranced to the acts of the operator, joined to absolute insentience, so far as appears, to irrelevant matter, need not surprise us, since we are all hourly doing the same thing. It is only the degree of completeness with which it is done that differs sufficiently to startle us.

The relative sensibility of the hypnotized toward his hypnotizer, side by side with his complete insensibility toward all else, may thus be accounted for; but there is a further exhibition of sensibility that he shows which is as startling as it is inexplicable on the generally received theories of the subject. This is the surprising vividness of his consciousness of things of which he comes to have any consciousness at all. We have seen an adumbration of this in dreams, but in the case of the hypnotized it fairly rises into the region of the marvelous. Like dreams, it is evidenced by the general vivid character of the subject's experiences, but unlike them it is further borne direct witness