Armed with this simplifying conception,--simplifying in spite of its frank admission of an underlying mystery,--we shall find no added difficulty in several points which have been the subjects of eager controversy. The _sequence_ of hypnotic phenomena, the question of the _stages_ of hypnotism, is one of these. I have already briefly described how Charcot propounded his three stages--lethargy, catalepsy, somnambulism--as though they formed the inevitable development of a physiological law;--and how completely this claim has now had to be withdrawn. Other schemes have been drawn out, by Liébeault, etc., but none of them seems to do more than reflect the experience of some one hypnotist's practice. The simplest arrangement is that of Edmund Gurney, who spoke only of an "alert stage" and a "deep stage" of hypnosis; and even here we cannot say that either stage invariably precedes the other. The alert stage, which often came first with Gurney's subjects, comes last in Charcot's scheme; and it is hardly safe to say more than that hypnotism is apt to show a series of changes from sleep-waking to lethargy and back again, and that the advanced stages show more of subliminal faculty than the earlier ones. There is much significance in an experiment of Dr. Jules Janet, who, by continued "passes," carried on Wittman, Charcot's leading subject, beyond her usual somnambulic state into a new lethargic state, and out again from thence into a new sleep-waking state markedly superior to the old.