Volume 2

Hypnotism and the doctors / [Richard Harte].

  • Harte, Richard.
Date:
1902-1903
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Hypnotism and the doctors / [Richard Harte]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    “ Mind cannot come in contact with gross matter . . mind touches electricity, electricity touches nerve, nerve touches muscle, muscle touches bone, and hone raises dead matter. . . Will is not a substance but a mere energy, or result of mind.” Just as Dr. Dods’s “Infinite Mind” resembles the “ Mahat ” of the Theosophists, and his “ elec- tricity ” is like their “ Fohat,” so also he pictures the human mind very much as they do their “ mind body.” He says:-- “ The mind, as a living being of embodied form, has its spiritual brain, and spiritual organs answering to the corresponding phrenological organs of the physical brain through which it manifests itself. “ The mind has its spiritual fingers, arms, limbs, and all its lineaments of form corresponding to those of the body. The mind holds its throne in the brain, and possessing in itself the power of feeling and motion, it merely stirs its spiritual fingers, or wields its spiritual arm, and through the electric action of the nerves, which are laid, like so many telegraph wires, between the two, the natural finger and the natural arm are compelled to make an exactly corresponding motion. . . All operations, convulsions, and motions begin in the unseen substance of the body, and end in its gross and solid parts. These are last moved, and last affected.” Dods, like most other pre-Darwinians, believed in special creations, and in the continual manifesta- tion of the providence of God ; yet he could not be blind to the fact that the will of God is constantly frustrated (to all appearance) by the failure of things to turn out as they were evidently intended to do. Things continually abort, and every such failure is a tremendous “ religious difficulty.” Mill said that he could not see how God could be both all-powerful and all-good. Dods gets over the difficulty in a way that reminds one of the Eastern division of the divine power into legislative and executive—the former lodged in Gods, the latter in Goddesses ; but his