The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-11-16

before him. The primary object was the fxation of the mind on a certain | object. Nay. even The hypnotist him. | self. if he use the method of attraction, may be hypnOtized, as Baird shows in | the following example: MT Walker, | Baird's friend, offered to hypnotize a certain person. When Baird went into l the room where the experiment was going on, he saw the gentleman sitting 1 staring at Mr. Walkers finger. MT. ] Walker was stadig a little to the right | of his patient with his eyes fixed stead fly on those of the latter. Baird passed on, and when he returned, he found MT. Walker standing in the same posi- 1 ton fast asleep. his arm and finger per fectly rigid and the patient wide awake, staring at the finger all the while
 FIVE EPOCHS OF THE SCIENCE.
 After Baird, many pursued the scien-
 tific investigation of the phenomena,
 and since 1875 the interest in the new science has spread all over Europe. ITO sum up, then.'' says Mir. Hays, ''the
 history of hypnotism may be divided into five epochs. The first, before the l time of MesmeT; the second, the age of
 mesmerism, when personal magnetism
 was supposed to be the attractive pow CT; the third, the age of Baird, when the science was put on physiological
 basis; the fourth the age of Bernheim and CharcOt, when the idea of sugges- tion was brought to the front and hyp- notism was psed indiscriminately; and lastly. the fifth, the age We are in now,
 where the tendency is to restrict hyp-
 notism and to classify it for specific
 uses" Regarding the nature of hypno-
 tism, Mir. Hays says:
 Each individual has a separate state
 of consciousness which changes as t0
 the thoughts therein. It is in the walk ing state that we have separate indi- vidualities. Now, let us see the grada tions of this consciousness At this present moment, we shall say, We are listening intently to a sermon. That Is
 the thing uppermost in our minds, and as long as our minds are upon it, We are exercising acute consciousness. But, even if our attention to this sermon is the central thing, in the fringe of our mental picture a number of other
 thoughts are jumping around. any enc
 of which may be powerful enough to force it's way into the middle of the picture ad to usurp its place. For ex-
 ample, all the while we are listening to this sermon we are more or less con scious that the seats we are in are hard, that somebody is talking next to us, etc. Our seats may become so uncom- fortable that it may occupy our whole attention, or something outside may seem of more interest. If our attention jumps from one thing to another, it is called diffused consciousness. The next step to diffused consciousness is the dreamy state, where the mind is half way between waking and sleep. Any thing may come into the mind while in this state and be the predominant idea, to be chased out again by next idea. It is for this reason that dreams usual ly present such a chaos and tumble. Our thoughts tumble over one another to get from the fringe of consciousness to the foreground. Any external sen sation will be greatly exaggerated and may turn the trend of our thought A warm bed might feel like the fire of he'll a heavy dinner with indigestion like the battles of heroes using our poor bodies as the fighting ground. As uf6tlIIS EIduutIIIY LdUG d"dyg we dp
 proach our first hypnosis. or sleep, which in the beginning is slight; but gradually deepens finally consciousness
 being entirely lost.
 "Thus we have traced the process of natural sleep to which hypnotic sleep
 is closely akin. The person at first has a diffused attention, he then confines his attention to sleep; he next passes into dreaming state, then into a light sleep, and lastly into a deep sleep The differences between 1t and natural
 sleep are as follows: first, the state or
 dinarily is produced by another sec-
 ondly, the person must have faith; and thirdly the phenomena in the sleep must be produced by suggestion. The
 two latter were fully recognized years ago, and have formed the basis of all psychical cures ever since. How the
 sleep can be produced by another was
 seen in the experiments of Braid, where one appreciates fully that the person
 really hypnotizes himself by gazing at
 an object. The full understanding be-
 tween hypnotized and hypnotist has
 never been really understood, and so
 here we are stopped short"
 USES OF HYPNOTISM.
 Regarding the uses of hypnotism, Mir.
 Hays says in part: "Tte general ten-
 dency has been in the last decade to
 use hypnotism indiscriminately; but like every therapeutic agent, it in time will become retricted and only used in
 certain complaints. It surely should be
 included by every physician in his
 therapeutic arsenal It has one thing
 In it's favor which places it above all
 remedial agents and that is that when
 it is used properly it can do no harm.
 We must recognize that in all the sci
 entific literature on the subject, there has not single death been reported from it's use The unscientiic applica- tiOn is it's abuse. We must also recog-
 nize that there are many cases that
 are practically incurable by medical treatment, cases which defy the great est physicians, cases which are sur
 prising because of their persistence.
 When the last extreme has been reach ed, when physicians consul and pro-
 nounce the case as practically incura- ble, hypnotism may be tried.
 Before the advent of ether or chloro- . form, the possibility of using hypno- tism for anaesthetic purposs was thought of and apparently it's use in I L Iosr,