APPENDIX A LOMBROSO’S SPIRITUALISTIC RESEARCHES During the correction of the previous chapters I have read Lombroso’s final and posthumous work, and I feel that it is expedient to append a brief account of Lombroso’s dealings with the spiritualists, which were, indeed, characteristic of his peculiar personality, but are without significance in relation to his more important investigations—those which interest us and will interest posterity. It was about the year 1890 that throughout Europe the investigations of psychiatrists, neurologists, and psychologists into the subject of hypnotism attained their acme. During the years 1885 to 1890 there was an unceasing current of hypnotic experiments. Almost every clinic had its own mediums; and soon some of these mediums, of whom not a few attended more than one clinic, produced occult phenomena, such as the action of medicaments at a distance (Bourru and others), the polarizing effect of magnets, thought-transference, and thought-reading, in addition to the phenomena of the hypnotic sleep and hypnotic suggestion. Not infrequently such séances as these, instituted by serious men of science, closely resembled the phenomena of the “animal magnetism” of the first third of the nineteenth century and the séances of the spiritualists during the middle third of the century. Men who, unquestionably, were well experienced in observation and in rigorous experiment—such men as Charcot, Richet, Preyer, Forel, and Zöllner—believed in the reality of the occult phenomena which gradually made their appearance in the hypnotic mediums. In the year 1888, Lombroso published a series of exhaustive experiments, dealing more especially with the limits of suggestion in the waking state, and the influence of a permanent magnet upon suggested sensations. It was most remarkable that this positivist investigator, a man whose habit it had been to confine himself to objective investigation, and to consider subjective phenomena as entirely subsidiary and to deal with them with extreme caution, should concern himself with matters so little accessible to objective observation as the reaction to hypnotic procedures and the examination of suggested ideas in hypnotized and hysterical subjects, and while engaged in this path of study to associate, ultimately, more and more intimately with thought-readers, spiritualists, and other thaumaturgists. It was, indeed, a result of his overwhelming conviction, at once of the objectivity and of the materiality of the performances of hypnotized persons, associated with a reluctance to accept the explanation of such phenomena by purely subjective factors—viz., their explanation solely by means of ideas—that led Lombroso to the credulous assumption that there existed a peculiar material condition of the brain-substance as the cause of all these categories of phenomena.