But these theories and suppositions are plainly the outcome of a premature simplification of our difficult problem. People are always too ready to thrust forward a new "power" or "force" to unify with dispatch and celerity uncomfortable phenomena of the present sort, and overlook the fact that every single phenomenon demands an exact investigation and explanation. Nothing is accomplished by calling phenomena "magical" or "transcendental." The work demanded is, to ascertain the connection and relation of the phenomena in question with the province of soul-life as a whole. To put an _x_ in the place of a _y_ contributes nothing to the solution of a problem. We cannot be too closely upon our guard against comprehensive syntheses of this character; for their splendid appearance dazzles woefully the eye of research. Much nearer the truth is the position that hypnosis merely is concerned here. A well-known author, Louis Maury, who wrote in the middle part of this century, says: "Among the principal methods of divination a great number aim at producing a sort of vertigo by acting upon the eyes and consequently upon the brain, in a manner something like that in which shining bodies act in hypnotism." Mrs. De Morgan speaks in a similar strain: "Crystal-vision is a well attested fact, having its laws and conditions like other phenomena in this world of known and hidden causes, and a little careful observation may clear away some of that obscurity which has kept it as the property of witches and sorcerers. The Crystal ... seems to produce on the eye of the seer an effect exactly like what would ensue under the fingers of a powerful mesmeriser. The person who looks at it often becomes sleepy. Sometimes the eyes close. At other times tears flow." Mrs. De Morgan's very description renders it doubtful whether we have to deal here with true, developed hypnotism. Other accounts are also calculated to shake this assumption. Cahagnet, for example, required only a moment of mental concentration for his eyes to become fixed; he lost all sight of the objects he had a moment before gazed upon, and those which he wished to call up appeared between him and the former. All spontaneous visions were fulfilled. When voluntarily evoked, but seven out of ten were true. When he wanted to produce the visions he fixed his eyes upon the first fit object, and he often saw hundreds and thousands of persons running hither and thither in one little shining point. Or he beheld a great city distinctly drawn in a mirror but one inch in diameter. This is not very easily reconciled with our conceptions of the character of hypnotism. Nor less so—to close our list of examples—the observations of an experimenter mentioned by Mrs. De Morgan, that the perceptions of crystal-vision are not interfered with by those of normal vision, but that the percipient could discontinue her observation at will, and returning would find the scene as she left it.