operator to subject, were also successful. Drs. Janet and Gibert also
produced sleep in a woman at a distance, by 'willing' it, at hours which
were selected by a system of drawing lots.[17] These facts, of course,
rather point to an element of truth in the old mesmeric hypothesis of some
specific influence in the operator. They cannot very well be explained by
suggestion and expectancy. But these facts and facts of clairvoyance and
thought-transference will be rejected as superstitious delusions by people
who have not met them in their own experience. This need not prevent us
from examining them, because _all_ the facts, including those now
universally accepted by Continental and scarcely impeached by British
science, have been noisily rejected again and again on Hume's principles.

The rarer facts, as Mr. Gurney remarks, 'still go through the hollow form
of taking place.' Here is an example of the mode in which these phenomena
are treated by popular science. Mr. Vincent says that 'clairvoyance and
phrenology were Elliotson's constant stock in trade.' (Phrenology was
also Braid's stock in trade.) 'It is a matter of congratulation to have
been so soon delivered from what Dr. Lloyd Tuckey has well called "a mass
of superincumbent rubbish."'[18] Clairvoyance is part of a mass of
rubbish, on page 57. On page 67, Mr. Vincent says: 'There are many
interesting questions, such as telepathy, thought-reading, clairvoyance,
upon which it would be perhaps rash to give any decided opinion.... All
these strange psychical conditions present problems of great interest,'
and are only omitted because 'they have not a sufficient bearing on the
normal states of hypnosis....' Thus what was 'rubbish' in one page
'presents problems of great interest' ten pages later, and, after offering
a decided opinion that clairvoyance is rubbish, Mr. Vincent thinks it rash
to give any decided opinion. It is rather rash to give a decided opinion,
and then to say that it is rash to do so.[19]