Following the French committee’s findings, in his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1827), Dugald Stewart, an influential academic philosopher of the “Scottish School of Common Sense”, encouraged physicians to salvage elements of Mesmerism by replacing the supernatural theory of “animal magnetism” with a new interpretation based upon “common sense” laws of physiology and psychology. Braid explicitly quotes the following passage from Stewart:

It appears to me, that the general conclusions established by Mesmer’s practice, with respect to the physical effects of the principle of imagination [...] are incomparably more curious than if he had actually demonstrated the existence of his boasted science [of "animal magnetism"]: nor can I see any good reason why a physician, who admits the efficacy of the moral [i.e., psychological] agents employed by Mesmer, should, in the exercise of his profession, scruple to copy whatever processes are necessary for subjecting them to his command, any more than that he should hesitate about employing a new physical agent, such as electricity or galvanism.

In Braid’s day, the Scottish School of Common Sense provided the dominant theories of academic psychology and Braid frequently refers to other philosophers within this tradition throughout his writings. Braid therefore revised the theory and practice of Mesmerism and developed his own method of “hypnotism” as a more rational and “common sense” alternative.

It may here be requisite for me to explain, that by the term Hypnotism, or Nervous Sleep, which frequently occurs in the following pages, I mean a peculiar condition of the nervous system, into which it may be thrown by artificial contrivance, and which differs, in several respects, from common sleep or the waking condition. I do not allege that this condition is induced through the transmission of a magnetic or occult influence from my body into that of my patients; nor do I profess, by my processes, to produce the higher [i.e., supernatural] phenomena of the Mesmerists. My pretensions are of a much more humble character, and are all consistent with generally admitted principles in physiological and psychological science. Hypnotism might therefore not inaptly be designated, Rational Mesmerism, in contra-distinction to the Transcendental Mesmerism of the Mesmerists.[17]

Despite briefly toying with the name “rational Mesmerism”, Braid ultimately distanced his approach from Mesmer’s and emphasised its uniqueness, carrying out many informal experiments throughout his career to refute the theories of Mesmerists and other supernatural practices, and demonstrate instead the role of ordinary physiological and psychological processes such as suggestion and focused attention in producing the effects observed.

Braid worked very closely with his friend and ally the eminent physiologist Professor William Benjamin Carpenter an early neuro-psychologist, who introduced the “ideo-motor reflex” theory of suggestion. Carpenter had observed many everyday examples of expectation and imagination apparently influencing the movement of muscles involuntarily.[18]

Braid soon assimilated Carpenter’s observations into his own theory of hypnotism, realising that the effect of focusing attention was to enhance the ideo-motor reflex response. Braid extended Carpenter’s theory to encompass the influence of the mind upon the body more generally, beyond the muscular system, and therefore referred to the “ideo-dynamic” response and coined the term “psycho-physiology” to refer to the study of interaction between the mind and body in general.

In his later works, Braid reserved the term “hypnotism” for the small minority of cases in which subjects entered a state of amnesia resembling sleep. For the rest, he spoke of “mono-ideodynamic” principle of action to emphasise that the eye-fixation induction technique worked by narrowing the focus of their attention to a single idea or train of thought (”monoideism”) which thereby amplified the effect of the consequent “dominant idea” upon the subject’s body by means of the ideo-dynamic principle.

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