ejected under ordinary conditions. These higher degrees
of hypnotic state are easily followed by complete loss of memory for all
that happened during the abnormal state.

How have we to interpret such a surprising alteration of mind? It lies
near to compare it with sleep. The brain seems powerless to produce its
normal ideas, the associations do not arise, the normal impulses have
disappeared and a general ineffectiveness has set in; in short, the
brain cells seem unable to function. Of course, the explanation of sleep
itself may offer difficulties. Is it a chemical substance which poisons
the brain during the sleep, or are the brain cells contracted so that
the excitement cannot run over from the branches of one nerve cell into
those of another? Or are the blood-vessels contracted so that an anaemic
state makes their normal function impossible? But whatever the physical
condition of sleep may be, have we really a right to emphasize the
similarity between sleep and hypnosis? After all that we have discussed,
we ought rather to recognize that the hypnotic state too comes much
nearer to the process of attention than to the process of sleep. We saw
that in every act of attention the process of inhibition is essential.
All that is not in harmony with the attended idea is suppressed. Yet we
should hesitate to say that in attention parts of our brain are asleep.

We should feel reluctance to group such inhibition together with sleep
because it would be a sleep which at any moment can pass from one part
of the brain to others and which certainly leaves at every moment most
of the cell groups unaffected. We saw that attention does not at all
focus on one narrow point, but that an abundance of impressions, of
ideas and associations, of thoughts and emotions can enter the field of
attention, if they all lead to one and the same motor attitude, and that
only the one part is inhibited which involves the opposite action. Such
a jumping sleep which at every moment selects a special part would be,
of course, just the contrary of that which characterizes the sleep state
of the fatigued brain. But exactly these characteristics of attention
belong to hypnotism too. It is not true that the mind of the hypnotized
is asleep and that perhaps only one or the other idea can be pushed into
his mind. On the contrary, his mind is open to an abundance of ideas,
just as in the normal state. If I tell him that this is a landscape in
Switzerland, he