phenomena of
hypnosis are now so fully recognized as established scientific facts that
it is quite superfluous to discuss the question of their credibility. Two
great medical schools have been founded upon them, and in some countries
they have become the subject of special legislation. The question before us
at the present day is, not as to the credibility of the facts, but as to
the proper inferences to be drawn from them, and a correct apprehension of
these inferences is one of the most valuable aids to the mental scientist,
for it confirms the conclusions of purely _a priori_ reasoning by an array
of experimental instances which places the correctness of those conclusions
beyond doubt.

The great truth which the science of hypnotism has brought to light is the
dual nature of the human mind. Much conflict exists between different
writers as to whether this duality results from the presence of two
actually separate minds in the one man, or in the action of the same mind
in the employment of different functions. This is one of those distinctions
without a difference which are so prolific a source of hindrance to the
opening out of truth. A man must be a single individuality to be a man at
all, and, so, the net result is the same whether we conceive of his varied
modes of mental action as proceeding from a set of separate minds strung,
so to speak, on the thread of his one individuality and each adapted to a
particular use, or as varied functions of a single mind: in either case we
are dealing with a single individuality, and how we may picture the
wheel-work of the mental mechanism is merely a question of what picture
will bring the nature of its action home to us most clearly. Therefore, as
a matter of convenience, I shall in these lectures speak of this dual
action as though it proceeded from two minds, an outer and an inner, and
the inner mind we will call the subjective mind and the outer the
objective, by which names the distinction is most frequently indicated in
the literature of the subject.

A long series of careful experiments by highly-trained observers, some of
them men of world-wide reputation, has fully established certain remarkable
differences between the action of the subjective and that of the objective
mind which may be briefly stated as follows. The subjective mind is only
able to reason _deductively_ and not inductively, while the objective mind
can do both. Deductive reasoning is the pure syllogis