There is no reason to doubt these results, except the fact that they have not yet been repeated with equal success; and my present purpose is to show how little importance can as yet be attached in the history of hypnotic experiment to the mere absence thus far of successful repetition. The next great stage was again strikingly different. It was mainly French; the impulse was given largely by Professor Charles Richet, whose work has proved singularly free from narrowness or misconception; but the movement was developed in a special and a very unfortunate direction by Charcot and his school. It is a remarkable fact that although Charcot was perhaps the only man of eminence whose professional reputation has ever been raised by his dealings with hypnotism, most of his work thereon is now seen to have been mistaken and aberrant,--a mere following of a blind alley, from which his disciples are now gradually returning. Charcot's leading phenomena (as with several of his predecessors above mentioned) were of a type which has seldom since been obtained. The once celebrated "three stages" of the _grand hypnotisme_ are hardly anywhere now to be seen. But in this case the reason is not that other hypnotists could not obtain the phenomena if they would; it is rather (as I have already indicated) that experience has convinced them that the sequences and symptoms on which Charcot laid stress were merely very elaborate products of the long-continued, and, so to say, endemic suggestions of the Salpêtrière. We come next to the movement which is now on the whole dominant, and to which the greatest number of cures may at present be credited. The school of Nancy--which originated with Liébeault, and which is now gradually merging into a general consensus of hypnotic practice--threw aside more and more decisively the supposed "somatic signs" of Charcot,--the phenomena of neuro-muscular irritability and the like, which he regarded as the requisite proof of hypnosis;--until Bernheim boldly affirmed that hypnotic trance was no more than sleep, and that hypnotic suggestion was at once the sole cause of hypnotic responsiveness and yet was undifferentiated from mere ordinary advisory speech. This was unfortunately too good to be true. Not one sleep in a million is really hypnosis; not one suggestion in a million reaches or influences the subliminal self. If Bernheim's theories, in their extreme form, were true, there would by this time have been no sufferers left to heal. What Bernheim has done is to cure a number of people without mesmeric passes, and without any special predisposing belief on either side,--beyond a trust in his own power. And this is a most valuable achievement, especially as showing how much may be _dispensed with_ in hypnotic practice--to how simple elements it may be reduced.