these
German researches and speculations. (Compare Mr. Vincent's 'Elements of
Hypnotism,' p. 34.) The Schellings were interested; Ritter thought he had
detected a new force, 'Siderism.' Mr. Wallace, in his preface to Hegel's
'Philosophie des Geistes,' speaks as if Ritter had made experiments in
telepathy. He may have done so, but his 'Siderismus' (Tuebingen, 1808)
is a Report undertaken for the Academy of Munich, on the doings of an
Italian water-finder, or 'dowser.' Ritter gives details of seventy-four
experiments in 'dowsing' for water, metals, or coal. He believes in the
faculty, but not in 'psychic' explanations, or the Devil. He talks
about 'electricity' (pp. 170, 190). He describes his precautions to
avoid vulgar fraud, but he took no precautions against unconscious
thought-transference. He reckoned the faculty 'temperamental' and useful.

Amoretti, at Milan, examined hundreds of cases of the so-called Divining
Rod, and Jung Stilling became an early spiritualist and 'full-welling
fountain head' of ghost stories.

Probably the most important philosophical result of the early German
researches into the hypnotic slumber is to be found in the writings of
Hegel. Owing to his peculiar use of a terminology, or scientific language,
all his own, it is extremely difficult to make Hegel's meaning even
moderately clear. Perhaps we may partly elucidate it by a similitude of
Mr. Frederic Myers. Suppose we compare the ordinary everyday consciousness
of each of us to a _spectrum_, whose ends towards each extremity fade out
of our view.

Beyond the range of sight there may be imagined a lower or physiological
end: for our ordinary consciousness, of course, is unaware of many
physiological processes which are eternally going on within us. Digestion,
so long as it is healthy, is an obvious example. But hypnotic experiment
makes it certain that a patient, in the _hypnotic_ condition, can
consciously, or at least purposefully, affect physiological processes to
which the _ordinary_ consciousness is blind--for example, by raising a
blister, when it is suggested that a blister must be raised. Again
(granting the facts hypothetically and merely for the sake of argument),
at the _upper_ end of the spectrum, beyond the view of ordinary everyday
consciousness, knowledge may be acquired of things which are out of the
view of the consciousness of every day. For example (for the sake of
argument let us admit it), unknown and remote people and