Animal Magnetism

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 edition. Excerpt: ...this idea proceeds from suggestion by the experimenter, or from simulation by the subject; it is only essential that it should be sufficiently intense as to affect the motor power. It is in this way that we hold that simulated phenomena may in some cases be absolutely confounded with real phenomena. This question of simulation in an individual liable to suggestion is, in fact, only one aspect of a much larger question: that of the action of the will on phenomena of suggestion. It may be asked whether an individual liable to suggestion can voluntarily create, modify, and destroy effects on himself comparable to those developed by suggestion. We are acquainted with facts which enable us to reply in the affirmative. We have seen subjects who could at pleasure, and in the waking state, call up the hallucinative image; when looking attentively at a sheet of white paper, they could cause it to appear red, blue, green, etc., and the colour thus evoked would be sufficiently distinct to give birth in due succession to the complementary colour which the subject could indicate correctly. This remarkable visual phenomenon differs from artificial hallucination in one respect; it requires a voluntary effort, continued for a period varying between twenty seconds and a minute, while a suggested hallucination occurs almost spontaneously. We met with another instance of voluntary suggestion in psychical paralysis. A subject to whom complete paralysis of the arm had been given was able to free herself from it after endeavouring for five minutes to move the paralysed limb. Unconscious Suggestion.--We have not yet had occasion to speak of this last kind of suggestion, which has a tendency to introduce itself like a parasite into the experimenter's mental...