Professor Royce's Lecture.

In spite of the driving storm a large audience gathered in Sanders Theatre to the fourth in the series of lectures by Professor Royce. He spoke in a very interesting way of hypnotism in relation to the psychology of imitation. He finds hypnotism nothing essentially different from the normal mental processes, the peculiarity being that the imitative faculty is exercised under conditions in which the ordinarily prominent self-assertiveness of the will is in abeyance. The hypnotized state closely resembles that of normal drowsiness or sleep, with the addition of a peculiar susceptibility to suggestions of the hypnotizer.

The possibility of being hypnotized is not limited to people of nervous temperament or weak wills. There is nothing extraordinary about either hypnotizer or subject, but the former must be skilled in the art of making fitting suggestions, the latter must desire to be hypnotized, making the effort to go to sleep while giving attention to any expressions of the will of the hypnotizer. When successfully hypnotized the subject is still awake to the voice of the hypnotizer and can converse with him. Having now no desire to make prominent his individual will the subjects capacity for imitation, which is ordinarily marked by an assertive individuality, becomes the prominent thing. Under these conditions he shows the remarkable susceptibility to suggestion, characteristic of the hypnotic state. But the hypnotizer has nothing like unlimited control over the subject. Some suggestions will be rejected as incongruous.

In the normal condition the larger part of a man's actions are imitative. Society owns and uses him, and wisely so, but the imitation is normally not the most prominent thing because of the individual's idea that he is having his own way in it all.