Braid’s theories were followed out by Chercot and the Paris School of Hypnotists, and their theories were in turn demolished by Liébault and Bernheim of the Nancy School, who held that all the phenomena of hypnotism in their turn were produced by suggestion. In point of actual fact, advanced thinkers of to-day hold that the same effect may be produced by all three methods of practice. In the same way we may produce a given electrical phenomenon such as the lighting of an incandescent lamp by the action of chemical solutions on metals in a battery, or by the rotation of a coil of wire between magnetic poles in a dynamo. The methods are different, but the forces evolved and the effect obtained are identical. The lay mind will follow my argument better if I use the loose terms of hypnotism and hypnosis than if I attempt a more scientific terminology. The first point that must be grasped is that the sorcerer or wizard possesses psychic gifts or qualities of an entirely different order to those claimed by Spiritualists. The sorcerer is a hypnotist--that is to say, he is an individual who possesses the power of emitting or radiating an unknown psychic force. Most people are neutral, they neither radiate this force nor do they oppose or resist its passage, but the individuals who are susceptible to its action seem to possess the faculty of arresting this radiation and converting it to mental energy within themselves. These are the people who are what is known as good hypnotic subjects. In the histories of the great sorcerers of the past the _assistant_, that is to say the subject, plays as important a rôle as does the mage himself, for the subject is the instrument of the master. The average person who possesses mediumistic or psychic qualities in the Spiritualistic sense, is in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred in a greater or lesser degree a sensitive hypnotic subject. The odd few who do not come in the above category may be classed as hermaphroditic or doubly gifted individuals who possess both radiating power and subjectivity. One or two noted materializing mediums of the past have been thus endowed. In the usual circle there is the medium and the sitters. Some of these may be neutral, but in an average circle there are one or more who possess unknown to themselves a certain amount of radiant force. It is this which passes along the chain of hands to the medium where it is arrested and condensed to play its mysterious part in the liberation of psychic elements that can be utilized by the unseen spirit workers. If there is present in the circle an individual who is greatly endowed with this force--and whose mental desires approximate to black rather than white magic, we have an instance of those dread dangers that beset those who unwittingly pass beyond the threshold of the known.