ety who, in
the year 1881, first turned general attention in this direction.
According to him, mankind possesses a nerve force which emanates from
him in different kinds of streams. Those coming from the eyes and
fingers produce insensibility to pain, while those generated by the
breath cause hypnotic conditions. This nerve force goes out into the
ether, and there obeys the laws that govern light, being broken into
spectra, etc.

Claude Perronnet has more lately advanced similar views, and his
greatest work is now in press. Frederick W.H. Myers and Edmund Gurney
sympathize with these views, and try to unite them with the mesmerist
doctrine of personal influence and their theory of telepathy. The
third champion in England of hypnotism, Prof. Hack Tuke, on the
contrary, sympathizes entirely with the Parisian school, only
differing from them in that he has experimented with satisfactory
results upon healthy subjects. In France this view has lately been
accepted by Dr. Bottey, who recognizes the three hypnotic stages in
healthy persons, but has observed other phenomena in them, and
vehemently opposes the conception of hypnotism as a malady. His
excellently written book is particularly commended to those who wish
to experiment in the same manner as the French investigator, without
using hysterical subjects.

The second counter current that opposed itself to the French
neuropathologists, and produced the most lasting impression, is
expressed by the magic word "suggestion." A generation ago, Dr.
Liebault, the patient investigator and skillful physician, had
endeavored to make a remedial use of suggestion in his clinic at
Nancy. Charles Richet and others have since referred to it, but
Professor Bernheim was the first one to demonstrate its full
significance in the realm of hypnotism. According to him,
suggestion--that is, the influence of any idea, whether received
through the senses or in a hypersensible manner (_suggestion
mentale_)--is the key to all hypnotic phenomena. He has not been able
in a single case to verify the bodily phenomena of _grandehypnotisme_
without finding suggestion the primary cause, and on this account
denies the truth of the asserted physical causes. Bernheim says that
when the intense expectance of the subject has produced a compliant
condition, a peculiar capacity is developed to change the idea that
has been received into an action as well as a great acuteness of
acceptation, which together will