Let us suppose, then, that we are standing at our present point, but with no more knowledge of hypnotic phenomena than existed in the boyhood of Mesmer. We shall know well enough what, as experimental psychologists, we desire to do; but we shall have little notion of how to set about it. We desire to summon at our will, and to subdue to our use, these rarely emergent sleep-waking faculties. On their physical side, we desire to develop their inhibition of pain and their reinforcement of energy; on their intellectual side, their concentration of attention; on their emotional side, their sense of freedom, expansion, joy. Above all, we desire to get hold of those supernormal faculties--telepathy and telæsthesia--of which we have caught fitful glimpses in somnambulism and in dream. Yet to such hopes as these the so-called "experience of ages" (generally a very short and scrappy induction!) will seem altogether to refuse any practical outcome. History, indeed,--with the wonted vagueness of history,--will offer us a long series of stories of the strange sanative suggestion or influence of man on man;--beginning, say, with David and Saul, or with David and Abishag, and ending with Valentine Greatrakes,--or with the Stuarts' last touch for the King's evil. But in knowledge of how actually to set about it, we should still be just on the level of the Seven Sages.[56] And now let the reader note this lesson on the unexhausted possibilities of human organisms and human life. Let him take his stand at one of the modern centres of hypnotic practice,--in Professor Bernheim's hospital-ward, or Dr. van Renterghem's _clinique_; let him see the hundreds of patients thrown daily into hypnotic trance, in a few moments, and as a matter of course; and let him then remember that this process, which now seems as obvious and easy as giving a pill, was absolutely unknown not only to Galen and to Celsus, but to Hunter and to Harvey; and when at last discovered was commonly denounced as a fraudulent fiction, almost up to the present day. Nay, if one chances to have watched as a boy some cure effected in Dr. Elliotson's Mesmeric Hospital, before neglect and calumny had closed that too early effort for human good;--if one has seen popular indifference and professional prejudice check the new healing art for a generation;--is not one likely to have imbibed a deep distrust of all _a priori_ negations in the matter of human faculty;--of all _obiter dicta_ of eminent men on subjects with which they do not happen to be acquainted? Would not one, after such an experience, rather choose (with Darwin) "the fool's experiment" than any immemorial ignorance which has stiffened into an unreasoning incredulity?