Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
Hypnosis is induced by devices occasioning muscular exhaustion, and thus
temporarily paralysing "voluntary muscles"--muscles, that is, which are
under conscious control. It is induced as well (as in the case cited) by
stroking, and thus putting to sleep the sensory nerves--nerves which
define the patient's consciousness of his material personality. It would
seem that by such inhibition, or paralysis, of the perceptions of the
outer consciousness, faculties of Subconsciousness--even of
Supra-consciousness--are exposed, so that Mind itself may be dealt with
direct.
Every form of insensibility is closely allied with muscular relaxation
or paralysis.
IV
Examples of the operation of the Supra-conscious faculties upon the
concrete plane are supplied by the marvellous feats of "lightning
calculators."
The most intricate mathematical problems--calculations that would call
for lengthy and complicated intellectual processes on the part of expert
mathematicians to work out by ordinary methods--are solved
instantaneously by the genius of such natural "calculators." You cannot
puzzle them; you cannot baffle them. Scarcely have you stated your
problem than they have calmly presented you with the solution. As
Maeterlinck records in his interesting book, _The Unknown Guest_, this
genius for figures developed in Colbourn and Safford at the age of six,
in Mangiamele at ten, in Gauss and Whateley at three. All that and more
than expert mathematicians laboriously acquire by decades of study and
practice, these boy-prodigies achieved by way of native faculty. Such
have not the slightest notion how they arrive at their results. These
are obtained automatically--are products of unconscious cerebration.
Maeterlinck observes of this, that the resultant "appears to rise,
infallible and ready-done, from a sort of eternal and cosmic reservoir
wherein the answer to every question lies dormant."
What is this "eternal and cosmic reservoir" if it be not Mind, or
Supra-consciousness, as distinguished from conscious intellection--a
native intuitive, but undifferentiate, or potential, consciousness which
holds the answer, "infallible and ready-done," to every question.
Truth _Is_. There is but one solution--the true one--of a mathematical
or any other problem of exact science.
A significant fact is that such prodigy boys generally lose their
mysterious faculty "_at the moment when the possessor begins to go to
school_." So soon, that is, as he develops the power of conscious
brain-processes--the power to work out his problems by concrete
methods--his native supra-conscious gift of solving them spontaneously
fails.
Intuition, the woman-mode of arriving at conclusions, lightning quick
and true without reason or reflection, is a kindred potency of Mind.
"When a man," says a French writer, "has laboriously climbed a
staircase, he is sure to find a woman at the top--although she will be
unable to say how she came there!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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