his grasp while he was holding fast on to it.
But I can see practically no resemblance whatever between the two cases.
For, in the case we have supposed (i) the hand did not move any material
object; (ii) no one but the hypnotized subject saw the hand; and (iii)
the illusion was only induced by repeated verbal suggestion to a subject
already hypnotized. Where is the analogy in the two cases? Home's hands
moved objects; they were seen by several people at once; and, so far as
the records prove anything, they prove that constant verbal suggestions
of the sort necessary were certainly _not_ given, while there is no
evidence whatever that the subjects were hypnotized! On this very
subject, speaking of Home's seances, Sir William Crookes has said:

"General conversation was going on all the time, and on many
occasions something on the table had moved some time before Home
was aware of it. We had to draw his attention to such things far
oftener than he drew our attention to them. Indeed, he sometimes
used to annoy me by his indifference to what was going on...."[32]

Does this look like suggestion? Is there any similarity between the two
cases? Their differences are too obvious to dwell upon. And, apart from
the performances of the Hindu fakirs (which I have discussed
elsewhere,[33] and which Count Solovovo himself thinks too few and too
weak evidentially to require serious consideration), there is no
similarity between an hallucination induced in a hypnotized subject by
constant verbal suggestion, and one supposedly induced instantaneously
in a large number of persons, not hypnotized, without any suggestion.
The cases cannot be considered similar, or even as resembling one
another in the slightest degree; while the improbability is heightened a
thousandfold by the fact that these hands apparently performed physical
actions and moved physical objects at the same time. The coincidence
would have to be explained as well as the hallucination, in that case.

Both Count Solovovo and Miss Johnson lay particular stress upon the fact
that the Master of Lindsay seems to have been extremely suggestible.
Assuredly, that is an important point in so far as his own experiences
are concerned, but the fact in nowise affects the experiences of
_others_. In order to prove that suggestibility played an important part
in the phenomena, it would be necessary to show that _all_ witnesses of
the phenomena were suggestible-