heard, which he can trace to a previous expectancy. Of this I can give you a very striking illustration in a case narrated by Dr. Tuke. A lady, whose mind had been a good deal occupied on the subject of drinking-fountains, was walking from Penrhyn to Falmouth, and thought she saw in the road a newly-erected fountain, with the inscription, "If any man thirst, let him come hither and drink." Some time afterward, on mentioning the fact with pleasure to the daughters of a gentleman whom she supposed to have erected it, she was greatly surprised to learn from them that no such drinking-fountain existed; and, on subsequently repairing to the spot, she found nothing but a few stones, which constituted the foundation on which her expectant imagination had built an ideal superstructure.
The same may be said with regard to the control exercised over the muscular movements of the biologized "subject," by the persuasion that he must or that he cannot perform a particular action. His hands being placed in contact with one another, he is assured that he cannot separate them, and they remain as if firmly glued together, in spite of all his apparent efforts to draw them apart. Or, a hand being held up before him, he is assured that he cannot succeed in striking it; and not only does all his power seem inadequate to the performance of this simple action, but it actually is so as long as he remains convinced of its entire impossibility. So I have seen a strong man chained down to his chair, prevented from stepping over a stick on the floor, or obliged to remain almost doubled upon himself in a stooping position, by the assurance that he could not move. On the other hand, an extraordinary power may be called forth in any set of muscles—as in hypnotized subjects—by the assurance that the action to be performed by them may be executed with the greatest facility. This, again, is quite conformable to ordinary experience; the assurance that we can perform some feat of strength or dexterity nerving us to the effort; while our power is weakened by our own doubts of success, still more by the unfavorable impression produced by a confident prediction of failure. It is only needed for the mind to become completely "possessed" by the one or the other conviction for it to produce the bodily results of this kind which I have over and over again witnessed.
Now the phenomena of the "biological" condition seem to me of peculiar significance, in relation to a large class of those which are claimed as manifestations of a supposed "spiritual" agency. When a number of persons of that "concentrative and imaginative turn of mind" which predisposes them to the "biological" condition sit for a couple of hours (especially if in the dark) with the expectation of some extraordinary occurrence—such as the rising and floating in the air, either of the human body, or of chairs or tables, without any physical agency; the crawling of live lobsters over their persons; the contact of the hands, the sound of the voices, or the visible luminous
