THE PROBLEMS OF HYPNOTISM. 503 sensible of any positive motive impelling them to act ; but it simply does not occur to them that they have a choice in the matter. 1 Even if we abandon free-will and stick to psychology, such facts as these seem decidedly awkward for the mechanical theory of the determination of conduct, at every point, by a motive that represents the greatest balance of foreseen pleasures or immunities from pain. And we are thus led to the completing step in our descrip- tion of the higher hypnotic state. That state may be regarded as the most complete exemplification of Prof. Bain's fruitful formula /< / of an idea to act itself out. I cannot regard Prof. Bain's own instances (Mental and Moral Science, p. 91) as the best examples of the law ; they seem to me rather to exemplify the common impulse to produce a marked effect, to ' make a scene ' of some sort, even at one's own cost. At the same time, I think that his formula repre- sents a reality, the scope of which even in ordinary life has hardly been sufficiently recognised. It seems to me the only possible ground for certain brief phases of sulkiness or perver- sity the shade of meaning may be best conveyed by the slang ' cussedness ' where a person finds himself persisting in an attitude or a line of conduct which causes him acute discom- fort at the time, with a promise of nothing but discomfort as the consequence. But in the case of hypnotism, at any rate, the idea is a most helpful one. For it enables us to bring under rule the cases that seemed most exceptional where, e.g., a ' subject ' is told that he cannot do a parti- cular thing, and struggles ineffectually to do it. We saw how absurd it was to represent his mind as throughout possessed by the idea of the impossibility, or his will as paralysed. But there is no great difficulty in supposing that the idea of impossibility obtains a momentary lodgment, and then tends to work itself out physically, even after the opposite idea the idea that the action is possible and shall be accom- plished has dislodged it from consciousness. We might fairly compare the automatic continuance of the brain- 1 The determinist may, no doubt, make a more general objection : he may say that the consciousness of free choice, however interpreted, is a normal antecedent of human voluntary action ; and that therefore he would have expected its absence to be accompanied by some other abnor- mality. I must, however, take leave to doubt whether, if taken unawares, he wuuld have evolved this expectation whether he would have regarded the (to him) purely illusive sense of having a free choice among several different courses as an indispensable element of directive force in the line of the one course that is actually taken. The hypnotic facts might therefore have an interest for him, if only because they clearly show the logical necessity of this very odd-looking admission.
