Medicine and the mind : (la medecine de l'esprit) / tr. from the French of Maurice de Fleury by Stacy B. Collins.

  • Fleury, Maurice de, 1860-1931.
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medicine and the mind : (la medecine de l'esprit) / tr. from the French of Maurice de Fleury by Stacy B. Collins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    we find ourselves facing a phenomenon which captivates us by its strangeness, we will wait, if we do not feel that our knowledge is yet ripe enough for competent study of the case. There is nothing to hurry us; that which we shall not have been able to do, our successors will accomplish, for they will be armed with all that we shall have achieved. Is not this resignation, this renunciation of knowing, this self-abnegation of the real savant before the Truth, a splendid thing, loftily philosophic, and worthy of admiration ? And what a fine lesson of patience it teaches, one by which all might profit, including those politicians who believe, or pretend to believe, that by their mere human will a sudden rush of the progress of society, in those onward leaps from which nature herself with her slow transitions, abstains, is to be accomplished. The existing results prove the excellence of this method. The information that has been acquired in twenty years is astonishing in its extent and its pre- cision. Hypnotism has taken rank in defined science. What has been done is quite definitive. It would need many pages to give an adequate idea of these things ; let us try to sum up the essential elements of them in a few lines. There does truly exist an hypnotic state which can be provoked, which is even spontaneous in certain 'sub- jects.' No human fluid is concerned in its production since the fixation of some or other luminous object suffices to produce it.