come.'[16]

The pendulum of thought has swung back a long way from the point whither
it was urged by David Hume. Hegel remarks: 'The facts, it might seem,
first of all call for verification. But such verification would be
superfluous to those on whose account it was called for, since they
facilitate the inquiry for themselves by declaring the narratives,
infinitely numerous though they be, and accredited by the education and
character of the witnesses, to be mere deception and imposture. Their _a
priori_ conceptions are so rooted that no testimony can avail against
them, and they have even denied what they have seen with their own eyes,'
and reported under their own hands, like Sir David Brewster. Hegel, it
will be observed, takes the facts as given, and works them into his
general theory of the Sensitive Soul (_fühlende Seele_). He does not try
to establish the facts; but to establish, or at least to examine them, is
the first business of Psychical Research. Theorising comes later.

The years which have passed between the date of Hegel's 'Philosophy of
Mind' and our own time have witnessed the long dispute over the existence,
the nature, and the causes of the hypnotic condition, and over the reality
and limitations of the phenomena. Thus the Academy of Medicine in Paris
appointed a Committee to examine the subject in 1825. The Report on
'Animal Magnetism,' as it was then styled, was presented in 1831. The
Academy lacked the courage to publish it, for the Report was favourable
even to certain of the still disputed phenomena. At that time, in
accordance with a survival of the theory of Mesmer, the agent in hypnotic
cases was believed to be a kind of efflux of a cosmic fluid from the
'magnetiser' to the patient. There was 'a magnetic connection.'

Though no distinction between mesmerism and hypnotism is taken in popular