hical Research Society. The confession will
be found printed in full at the close of this book.

CHAPTER V.

Self-Hypnotization.--How It may Be Done.--An Experience.--Accountable for
Children's Crusade.--Oriental Prophets Self-Hypnotized.

If self-hypnotism is possible (and it is true that a person can
deliberately hypnotize himself when he wishes to till he has become
accustomed to it and is expert in it, so to speak), it does away at a
stroke with the claims of all professional hypnotists and magnetic
healers that they have any peculiar power in themselves which they exert
over their fellows. One of these professionals gives an account in his
book of what he calls "The Wonderful Lock Method." He says that though
he is locked up in a separate room he can make the psychic power work
through the walls. All that he does is to put his subjects in the way of
hypnotizing themselves. He shows his inconsistency when he states that
under certain circumstances the hypnotizer is in danger of becoming
hypnotized himself. In this he makes no claim that the subject is using
any psychic power; but, of course, if the hypnotizer looks steadily into
the eyes of his subject, and the subject looks into his eyes, the steady
gaze on a bright object will produce hypnotism in one quite as readily
as in the other.

Hypnotism is an established scientific fact; but the claim that the
hypnotizer has any mysterious psychic power is the invariable mark of
the charlatan. Probably no scientific phenomenon was ever so grossly
prostituted to base ends as that of hypnotism. Later we shall see some
of the outrageous forms this charlatanism assumes, and how it extends to
the professional subjects as well as to the professional operators, till
those subjects even impose upon scientific men who ought to be proof
against such deception. Moreover, the possibility of self-hypnotization,
carefully concealed and called by another name, opens another great
field of humbug and charlatanism, of which the advertising columns of
the newspapers are constantly filled--namely, that of the clairvoyant and
medium. We may conceive how such a profession might become perfectly
legitimate and highly useful; but at present it seems as if any person
who went into it, however honest he might be at the start, soon began to
deceive himself as well as others, until he lost his power entirely to
distinguish between fact and imagination.

Before discussing the matter further