FUETHEE PEOBLEMS OF HYPNOTISM. (l.) 213 minor degree in all manner of circumstances of absorbed attention or sudden shock. It appears to me that the only serviceable definition must depend on the idea of what I have ventured in a former paper (MiND No. 36) to call " psychical reflex action". That is to say, I should confine the term ' hypnotic trance ' to a state in which (or in some stage of which) inhibition reaches the higher inhibi- tory and co-ordinating faculties ; and particular ideas, or groups of ideas, readily dissociating themselves from their normal relation to other groups and to general controlling conceptions, and throwing off the restraint proper to elements in a sane scheme, respond with abnormal vigour and certainty to any excitations that may be addressed to them. Such response may be shown (1) in the inhibition, by command, of ordinary muscular movements or control of movements ; (2) in the ease with which the ' subject's ' mind can be steered, so to speak, in the course of conversation or narra- tion ; but chiefly (3) in the ready imposition, by external suggestion, of sensory hallucinations, or (4) of abnormal lines of conduct. This psychical characteristic (educible, if not actually educed, in the ' subject ' see MIND No. 33) has belonged to nearly all the cases which have been described as hypnotic, and, in a marked degree, scarcely to any others ; for only by the rarest exception does it occur spontaneously in morbid cases. As thus defined, moreover, hypnotism is conveniently marked off from the natural condition som- nambulism to which it is most akin. And the definition has the further advantage of emphasising what are not only the most constant but also decidedly the most important and instructive of the hypnotic phenomena. 1 For in every branch of mental and moral science psychology, ethics, jurisprudence and, we may add, the extraordinary thera- peutical applications of ' suggestion ' the interest of Hyp- notism, of which every year witnesses a marked advance, has centred in the various forms of mono-ideism embraced under the conception of " psychical reflex action ". Now all this interest has to do, of course, with the state itself, not with its genesis. The facts studied are peculiari- ties of mental condition which appear after the induction, by whatever means, of a certain stage of hypnotic trance. Questions connected with the means by which the trance may be induced have held for the psychologist a subordinate 1 Such a definition of the trance proper need not, of course, prevent us from applying hypnotic terms to local affections such as the rigidity or anaesthesia of a single limb which are brought about by means similar to those used in the production of trance
