Page "James Braid (surgeon)" Paragraph 17

:" I adopted the term " hypnotism " to prevent my being confounded with those who entertain those extreme notions that a mesmeriser's will has an " irresistible power … over his subjects " and that clairvoyance and other " higher phenomena " are routinely manifested by those in the mesmeric state, as well as to get rid of the erroneous theory about a magnetic fluid, or exoteric influence of any description being the cause of the sleep.

I distinctly avowed that hypnotism laid no claim to produce any phenomena which were not " quite reconcilable with well-established physiological and psychological principles "; pointed out the various sources of fallacy which might have misled the mesmerists ; was the first to give a public explanation of the trick which a fraudulent subject had been able to deceive his mesmerizer …