riments show that if sensibility is not
abolished, it is at least very much blunted.

It might be concluded from the above that Mrs Piper would be an
excellent hypnotic subject. She is nothing of the kind. Without being
precisely refractory to hypnotism, she is only an indifferently good
hypnotic subject. Professor William James of Harvard has made
experiments to elucidate this point. His two first attempts to hypnotise
Mrs Piper were entirely fruitless. Between the second and third,
Professor William James asked Phinuit, during a mediumistic trance, to
be kind enough to help him to make the subject hypnotisable. Phinuit
promised; in fact, he always promises all that is asked. At the third
attempt Mrs Piper fell slightly asleep, but only at the fifth sitting
was there a real hypnotic sleep, accompanied by the usual automatic and
muscular phenomena. But it was impossible to obtain anything more.
Hypnosis and trance, in Mrs Piper, have no points of resemblance. In the
trance, muscular mobility is extreme. In hypnosis, just the contrary is
the case. If she is ordered during hypnosis to remember what she has
said or done, she remembers. During the trance, the control has more
than once been asked to arrange that Mrs Piper should recall, on waking,
what she had said; but this has never succeeded. During the mediumistic
trance she seems to read the deepest recesses of the souls of those
present like a book. During hypnosis there is no trace of this
thought-reading. In short, the mediumistic trance and the hypnotic sleep
are not one and the same thing. Whatever may be the real nature of the
difference, this difference is so great that it strikes the least
attentive observer at once.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] In the opinion of the chief witnesses of the Cambridge sittings the
frauds of Eusapia Paladino were not unconscious. Mr Myers said, in the
report to the Society immediately after the sittings:--"I cannot doubt
that we observed much conscious and deliberate fraud, of a kind which
must have needed long practice to bring it to its present level of
skill."--_Journal of Society for Psychical Research_ for 1895, p. 133,
_Trans._

[5] _Proc. of the S.P.R._, vol. vi. p. 444.

[6] _Proc. of S.P.R._, vol. xvi.

[7] _Proc. of S.P.R._, vol. viii. p. 5.

CHAPTER III

Early trances--Careful first observations by Professor William James of
Harvard University, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

I have already explained on what occasion Mrs