The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-11-10
HYPNoTTsM AND CRIMES.
French Expert Interestingly Shows How Small Is the Service
 If Renders

1 l5s 1AOAN 3hollletil IS lllS oSENlS6
 It Renders.
 Dr. Pierre Janet lectured last even- ing in Huntington Hall on 'Le retre- cisement de Ia conscience ct les os- cillations du niveau mental" It was the concluding lecture in his series on Les problems psychologiques de Thy phnotisme.Y
 There is field" said Dr. Janet Where the uses of hypnotism, and especially its limits, need to be known, and indeed have been extensively dis cussed. This is the field of jurisprud- ence. A novel which appeared some 20 years ago makes its hero 8 poor and ambitious medical student who has found a susceptible girl whom he has no great difficulty in hypnotizing. It happens that having occasion to visit the house of a wealthy man, he sees a large amount of money in bank1otes being concealed between the pages of a book in his library. The temptation is too great for him. Not daring to att tempt the robbery himself, he hypno- tized his favorfte subject and com mands her to the letter; entering the rich mans house she finds him in the act of counting his money. She en- ideavors to seize it; he naturally resists whereupon she kills him, and delivers the money to her hypnotizer The mur- derer is sought, and of course readily located; but she knows nothing of the act beyond a vague idea that she must have been in the mans house. The deus ex machina is an old family doc tor, who g7uesses the girls susceptible lity to hypnotic suggestions, demons trates 1t by experiment, and thus ap- prehends the guilty man.
 This romance, 20 years ago. was subject of widespread and acrinooni- ous discussion. Could the thing have happened? Is the world at large lia- ble to such vicarious crinninaIity? The answers of the two sides were point blank asseveration and negation. Said one: This story Is only a reproduc- tion of the truth; it has been demon- strated a hundred times, and may be again at any moment So, indeed, ex- periments were made; crimes were suggested and committed; the very plot of the story was reached in ex- pertinent; but the subject was not per nlitted to kill the ffnaneier Here the others replied. You have not fulfilled your promise; the robbery did take place but not the murder" Oh. but that is too serious matter for ex-t pertinent, replied the supporters of the probability of the novel. still there was nothing proved. Even suggestion of assassination where the subjects are armed with paper poniards which they use with deadly intent, prove nothing. For deep in the bottom of the subjects consciousness, in spite of the efforts of the suggestion, there does lie, I be- lieye, the assurance that the weapon is really harmless. Tn one instance. where six or seven persons had been thus 'assassinated' and had retired in good order the students who remained with the subject tried to induce him to commit some lesser but more real crime, and they promptly met de- cided resistance.
 There is then, at best, but little satisfaction in these trumped-up ex- periments: nothing is demonstrated bv them so long as the crimes are only imaginary. To be certain we must consult the annals of real crime and try to determine if hypnotic suggestion has been responsible for crimes in real life. Of all the cases where hypnotism has been alleged as a cause, know of but three where the fact has been clearly shown. The gravest of these was an infanticide; but here we find that everything depends upon the na- ture of the somnambulist; the subject was a dipsomaniac, a woiran whose normal state was that of intoxication. To be sure, it was demonstrated that the act was committed upon hypnotic suggestion, but the suggestion would not have been necessary. The al- coholism alone would have been suffi- cient. Boston Transcript.