Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Hypnotism, mesmerism and the new witchcraft / by Ernest Hart. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![distinct kind. That any medical man should have thought' phenomena' such as those obligingly displayed by these subjects worthy of serious study is, as Carl vie would have said, ' significant of much.' What weight can be attached to the judgment of persons so devoid of the critical faculty when dealing with these matters ? If they allow themselves to be gulled by so sorry an impostor as L., ai*e they not likely to be as wax in the hands of subjects of a higher order, in whom a natural genius for deception has been developed, and I may say educated, by the unconscious tuition of scientific enthu- siasts ? I am willing to believe that some subjects may, like Hamlet, be ' indifferent honest,' at least at first; but it must be as difficult for a person who is habitually made the subject of such experiments to remain truthful as for a ]3ublican to be a total abstainer. The wish to please the investigator leads in the first instance to a little over-colouring ; then come a harmless experiment or two on the scientific pundit's credulity, and so on, the appetite for deception growing by that it feeds on, to systematic imposture. Men are easily induced to see what they are anxious to see, and even the dry light of science does not always keep its votaries out of this pitfall. ' Suggestion ' often acts more powerfully on the operator than on the subject. It is not too much to say that the majority of obser- vations of hypnotic phenomena which we are invited to accept on the authority of men of acknowledged scien- tific competence and indisputable personal integrity are](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21912439_0204.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
