The apparent resemblance, indeed, between narcosis and hypnosis diminishes on a closer analysis. A stage may occur both in narcotised and in hypnotised subjects where there is incoherent, dream-like mentation; but in the narcotised subject this is a step towards inhibition of the whole nervous energy--the highest centres being paralysed first; whereas in hypnosis the inhibition of supraliminal faculty seems often at least to be merely a necessary preliminary to the liberation of fresh faculty which presently manifests itself from a profounder region of the self. Next take another group of massive effects produced on the nervous system by external stimuli;--those forms, namely, of trance and cataplexy which are due to sudden shock. With human beings this phenomenon varies from actual death from failure of heart-action, or paralysis, or _stupor attonitus_ (a recognised form of insanity), any of which may result from a mere alarming sight or unwelcome announcement, down to the cataleptic immobility of a Salpêtrière patient, when she hears a sudden stroke on the gong. Similar phenomena in certain animals, as frogs, beetles, etc., are well known. It is doubtful, however, whether any of these sudden disablements should be classed as true hypnoses. It has not, I think, been shown that in any case they have induced any real responsiveness to control, or power of obeying suggestion; unless it be (as in some Salpêtrière cases) a form of suggestion so obvious and habitual that the obedience thereto may be called part of the actual cataplexy itself. Thus the "wax-like flexibility" of the cataleptic, whose arms remain in the position where you place them, must not be regarded as a readier obedience to control, but rather as a state which involves not a more but a less alert and capable responsiveness of the organism to either external or internal stimuli. So with regard to animals--crocodiles, frogs, and the like. I hold theoretically that animals are probably hypnotisable and suggestible; and the records of Rarey's horse-taming, etc., seem to point in that direction.[60] But in the commoner experiments with frogs, where mere passivity is produced, the resemblance seems to extend only to the lethargic stage in human beings,[61] and what relation that lethargy bears to suggestibility is not, I think, really known; although I shall later on suggest some explanation on psychological grounds. It seems plain, at any rate, that it must be from stimuli applied to men and not to animals, and from stimuli of a special and localised rather than of a massive kind, that we shall have to learn whatever can be learnt as to the genesis of the true hypnotic control.