This is also the opinion of Hegel, who supposes our primitive mental condition to be capable of descrying objects remote in space and time.  Mr. Myers, as we saw, is of the opposite opinion, as to the relative dignity and relative reality of the present everyday self, and the old original fundamental Self.  Dr. Dessoir refrains from pronouncing a decided opinion as to whether the original, primitive, hallucinated self within us does ‘preside over powers and actions at a distance,’ such as clairvoyance; but he believes in hypnotisation at a distance.  His theory, like Hegel’s, is that of ‘atavism,’ or ‘throwing back’ to some very remote ancestral condition.  This will prove of interest later.

Hegel, at all events, believed in the fact of clairvoyance (though deeming it of little practical use); he accepted telepathy (’the magic tie’); he accepted interchange of sensations between the hypnotiser and the hypnotised; he believed in the divining rod, and, unlike Kant, even in ‘Scottish second-sight.’  ’The intuitive soul oversteps the conditions of time and space; it beholds things remote, things long past, and things to 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 (fuehlende 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.’