e-teller of the Mrs. Piper class in London, he had a cold
trickling up his feet, doubtless from hypnotism, to help thought reading.
The tickling of the face is the result of a more or less vain attempt to
reach the ear or eye. It will be felt by people driving whose ear and eye
would otherwise be affected. People sleeping in an exposed place may
suffer more, as the fixed recumbent position makes them obnoxious to
attack, as was previously remarked. The hyperaesthesia spreads in a
slight degree round the eye.
The nature of the eye is hardly understood yet; it is quite possible that
subconscious pictures pass before us like a cinematograph, enforcing or
enforced by our thoughts. It has been remarked that thought is a species
of self-hypnotism. Hypnotism may only make these pictures more distinct
and modify them by degrees. In the attempt to inflict a picture on the
eye, only the dark image of it may be seen. The writer believes that this
means failure to affect the mind. Binet and Fere mention the dark
after-shadow.
The extremest direct effect of hypnotism upon the eye, mechanically
speaking, is doubtless scarcely more than the shock of thistledown wafted
against it by a gentle breeze. It appears to affect the corners of the
eye; the electric film is perhaps divided by the approach over the
skin to another and damper tissue. But hyperaesthesia sometimes spreads
to the upper cheek.
Madame de Maceine saw Rubinstein's hallucinatory picture with the corner
of her eye.[22] A shock even as slight as a bit of thistledown blown
against the cornea might be ill--timed at a street-crossing. Mr. S. of
B---- was run over in the streets of London and killed. He had been
previously hypnotically affected, for he heard quantities of raps; these
were no friendly signs of spirits, but the affection of his early
hypnotists practising against him.
[Footnote 22: _Vide_ a leading article, _Daily News_, July 23.]
A double image is seen, the eye being curiously affected, when for
instance the knobs of a chest of drawers appeared through the apparition.
The vision is in the veil or mist of Ibn Khaldoon. Does not this cast a
light upon the conceptive and receptive powers of the eye. The conceptive
power is shown, as Binet and Fere remark, by the fact that our
imagination has done away with the end of a nerve which should be seen at
every instant of our lives. Light images may be given by feeble
hypnotists of which but the dark reactio
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