It is no easy matter to give full credit to the reality of the mesmeric phenomena, or to admit the alleged facts, and when forced to do so by a mass of testimony which it is impossible to resist, nothing is more natural than that we should suggest various hypotheses to account for them. Of all these hypotheses no one, to those who have been eye-witnesses of the mesmeric phenomena, is less satisfactory than that which attributes them to a species of juggling or sleight-of-hand, or to collusion between the magnetized and the magnetizer. Whatever may be the jugglery or connivance in particular cases, or whatever be the real solution of the problem, we must, as a general rule, admit the good faith of the parties. The man who could produce by address or skill, by art, the wonderful phenomena produced by the mesmerizer, who could so successfully elude the scrutiny of the most acute and intelligent witnesses, and so effectually deceive the senses of all classes, would have no motive to practise mesmerism, for he could produce more excitement, and gain more notoriety, and more money as a professed juggler. It is very easy for those who have never seen the mesmeric phenomena, to set them down as a mere cheat, which they, if present, could very easily have detected, but it is very possible that they who have witnessed them are as able to detect an imposition as would be these critics themselves, and are far better judges than they are, not having seen them, unless we are to suppose that the blind can in some cases see better than those who have eyes. Among the innumerable witnesses of these phenomena there may be as careful and as intelligent observers as those who emit their oracles with solemn gravity on matters of which they confessedly know nothing. Academicians and members of royal and scientific societies are no doubt very respectable personages, but they are not always the best observers in the world. I would trust “Jack” to distinguish between a seal or horse-mackerel and the sea-serpent, much quicker than I would Professor Owen or Professor Agassiz. Learned academicians and members of scientific societies, whether of Paris or London, Berlin or Philadelphia, are the easiest people in the world to impose upon. A clever lad could pass off upon them a sucker for a pike, and a crawfish for a lobster. But they need not judge all the world by themselves. Human testimony is not yet become wholly worthless. There is a cloud both of competent and of credible witnesses in almost every country, to the reality of the mesmeric phenomena, and to the good faith, the simplicity, and trustworthiness of both mesmerizers and mesmerized. Whatever be the agent that actually produces these extraordinary phenomena, we must seek it elsewhere than in mere jugglery, sleight-of-hand, trickery, or fraud.
I do not give the results of my first experiments as any thing very wonderful. They would excite little attention now. Mesmerism is much more advanced than it was in the hands of my French friend. It is true, there were rumors even then of far more marvellous phenomena, strange stories of clairvoyance or second-sight were whispered, and strange revelations of an invisible world, not recognized by received science, were hinted; but my friend would not heed them. He was a rationalist, and would not hear of any thing not explicable on natural principles. But what I witnessed convinced me of the reality of the magnetic sleep, and of the subjection of the somnambulist to the will of the mesmerizer, or that one person can, under certain circumstances, exercise an absolute control over the organs of another, and render the somnambulist, during the magnetic sleep, absolutely insensible to all save the mesmerizer. Here was certainly a marvellous power; what was it? Was it, as Bailly and Franklin’s Report of 1784 asserted, the imagination? Singular effect of imagination that would put a person asleep at another’s will, render her completely insensible—dead to all the world but the mesmerizer; make her go to sleep and wake up at the time specified, answer questions only mentally put, and with a promptness and an accuracy wholly impossible in her normal state! A very inexplicable imagination that, and itself not less puzzling than the mesmeric phenomena themselves.
“No, it is not imagination,” insisted Dr. P——, “any more than it is a magnetic fluid, as asserted by Mesmer. It is the will of the magnetizer operating immediately on the will of the somnambulist, and through that on her organs. Or rather, it is the spiritual being in me operating immediately on the spiritual being in her, and therefore these phenomena afford an excellent refutation of materialism, and reveal a great and glorious law of human nature, recognized, though misconceived, in all ages and nations; a mighty law, but hitherto denied to human nature, and supposed to be something lying out of our sphere, superhuman, and even supernatural. Modern science began by denying the mysterious facts recorded in history, but it is beginning to accept them, and to show that they are all explicable on the principles of human nature.”
“What strikes me as most remarkable in the mesmeric phenomena,” said Mr. Winslow, a rather grave minister of the extreme left of the Unitarian denomination, who had joined Dr. P—— and myself on our way to my lodgings, “what strikes me as most remarkable in the mesmeric phenomena is, not the kind of power they reveal, but the degree. Every man who has been accustomed to public speaking, if he has observed, is conscious of a kindred power.”
“To put his audience asleep,” interposed Jack Wheatley, a young lawyer, who was usually one of my companions while in the city, “but not always to make them submissive to his will.”
“It is a mysterious power,” continued Mr. Winslow, “which the orator seems to have over his audience, a power of which he is conscious, but which is wholly unintelligible to himself.”
“But very intelligible to his hearers,” interposed Jack.
“You are impertinent, sir,” replied the minister, with offended dignity. Sometimes when I have attempted to preach, I have found myself, though perfectly familiar with my subject, hardly able to say a word. My ideas dance around and before my mind like summer insects, but at such a distance, and with such rapidity, that I strive in vain to seize them. If I do succeed in saying something, my words penetrate not my hearers; they as it were rebound, and affect only myself.”
“Indeed!” interjected the incorrigible Jack.
“Other times,” continued Mr. Winslow, not heeding Jack’s exclamation, “my ideas seem to come of themselves, to flow without effort, and to clothe themselves, without any thought or intervention of mine, in the most fitting words. I find myself elevated above myself; I am in intimate relation with the minds of my hearers. It seems that an electric current passes from them to me and from me to them, making us as it were one man. I speak with their combined force added to my own, and each of them hears and takes in my words with the united understanding of all.”
“There may be something in that,” said Jack. “You know, Doctor,” turning to me, “that I have no more religion than a horse, and am seldom serious for five consecutive minutes in my life. Well, being in the country the other evening, on a visit to a crotchety old aunt, whose very cat would not dare to purr or to wash her face on Sunday, and finding it exceedingly dull, I took it into my head to seek a little amusement or diversion by attending a Methodist prayer-meeting, or conference, held in a school-house close by. I seldom go to meeting, but once-and-awhile I like to attend a Methodist evening gathering. I sometimes find plenty of fun. The performances this evening had begun before my arrival, for, as usual, I was rather late. On entering I found the house crowded almost to suffocation. Ten or a dozen men, women, boys, and girls, were down on their knees, all screaming at once from the very top of their lungs, and the rest of the brethren and sisters were groaning, shouting, clapping their hands, in glorious confusion. I worked my way along to a vacant spot which I spied just before a blazing fire. Turning my back to the fire, and holding aside the skirts of my coat so that they should not get scorched, I stood and looked for some minutes on the scene before me. At first I was struck with its comical character, and was much amused; soon, however, I grew serious, became sad, and then indignant, that beings in human shape, and endowed, I presumed, with the faculty of reason, should make such fools of themselves. I inwardly resolved that for once I would “speak in meeting,” and that as soon as there should be a pause or a lull, so that I could stand some chance of making myself heard, I would give them a piece of Jack Wheatley’s mind. In a word, I resolved to give them a downright scolding, and to tell them plainly what fools they were to suppose that they could please God by acting like so many bedlamites or howling dervishes.
“Well, after some fifteen or twenty minutes, there came a slacking up, and I opened my mouth. I remembered what my old rhetoric master had taught me, though how I came to is a puzzle, and resolved to begin in a modest and conciliatory manner. It would not do to shock them in the outset. I must first gain their ears and their good-will. So I began with a grave face and a solemn tone, and made some commonplace remarks on religion, and the duty to love and worship God, meaning, (after my preliminary remarks, intended to gain the jury,) to bring in, with crushing effect, my rebukes. But the brethren did not wait. Mistaking me for a pious exhorter, they cried out almost at my first words, “Amen!” “Glory!” “Bless the Lord!” “Go on, brother!” Will you believe it? Instantly I caught the enthusiasm, became possessed by the =genius loci=, entered in spite of myself into the spirit of the meeting, and gave a most magnificent methodistical exhortation. The brethren and sisters were edified, were enraptured, and when the time came for the meeting to break up, the leader requested me to close the performances with prayer, which I did with great fervor and unction. The spell lasted till I got out of the house into the open air.”
“So Saul was among the prophets,” remarked Mr. Winslow, as Jack concluded. “I am not surprised, for something similar occurred to myself when I first began to preach. There is, I believe, something infectious in these Methodist gatherings, and a wise man often finds himself acting in them as a fool acteth.”
“Few wise men, I should think, ever go near them,” I remarked.
“I know not how that may be,” replied Mr. Winslow, “but there are few men that are always wise, or who never find themselves doing a foolish action. Even the greatest and wisest of our race sometimes unbend, and prove that there are points in which they are united to ordinary humanity. There is in this secret and invisible influence, to which I refer, of one man over another that has long arrested my attention. Often have I known both speaker and hearers electrified by a few commonplace words, carried away, it would seem, by a force not their own; now melted into tears; now inflamed with a pure and unearthly love; now maddened with rage; now fired with a lofty enthusiasm, swelling with heroic emotions, and panting to do heroic deeds. In these moments man is more than man; a higher than man possesses him, and he becomes thaumaturgic, works miracles, removes mountains, stops the course of rivers, heals the sick, casts out devils, moves, speaks, and acts a god. I call it the demonic element of human nature, and I think, if these mesmeric phenomena turn out to be real, they will be found to have their explanation in this mysterious and even fearful element, which the older theologians called faith, and superstition looks upon as supernatural.”
“That there is some analogy between Animal Magnetism and the class of facts to which you refer, or which you have in your mind,” observed Dr. P——, “I do not deny. But, after all, what is the power which produces them? To resolve one class of facts into another, equally if not more mysterious, is not to explain them.”
“But what more, my dear Doctor,” I asked, “do you yourself do? There are here two distinct questions: Is there really such a class of extraordinary phenomena as you mesmerizers assert? and if so, what is the agent or efficient cause in producing them? As to the first, I am so far satisfied as to concede that the remarkable phenomena asserted may be real; but I have not seen enough to warrant any sound induction as to their cause or general law. I must continue my observation of facts much longer, and extend it much further, before I proceed to any induction in the case. You say they are produced by the will of one acting immediately on the will of another, and through that on the organs of the person magnetized, by virtue, as you allege, of a law of human nature. Yet you do not tell us what this law is, or what is the nature of that which my reverend friend calls the demonic power of man.”
“In no case does it belong to man to answer similar questions,” replied Dr. P——. “We in no case know the essences of things. All that men are able to do is to observe phenomena, and from them to infer or affirm that there is and must be an agent or power which produces them. Can you tell me what is gravitation? All you can tell me is, that bodies fall or tend to the centre of the earth, and what are the laws and conditions of that tendency. What is electricity? You cannot tell me. You can only tell me that there is a certain class of phenomena, which you can trace to a certain invisible and imponderable agent, and to that invisible and unknown agent, that ‘occult power,’ as an earlier philosophy would have called it, you give the name of electricity. All you can know of it is, its existence, the laws by which it operates, the means by which you can avail yourself of it, get power over it, avert it from your house or barn when it breaks forth in the thunder-gust, or use it to drive your machinery, to convey your messages, or to solace your pain. Science calls it a fluid, but what it is in itself science knows not, for it has seen it only in its operations or effects. So with this power, or law of human nature, to which I ascribe the magnetic phenomena. All I pretend to tell is, that the law is a reality, and all I pretend to demonstrate is, that we may avail ourselves of it, and use it for the most useful and noble purposes. This is enough. All we need to know is its existence, or the purposes to which it may be applied, and how we can apply it or render it serviceable. Let man know that he has it, and then let him learn how to use it.”
“But after all, I am a little frightened at the supposition of this power,” remarked Mr. Winslow. “There is something fearful in this complete subjection of one, soul and body, to the will of another. The somnambulist is, during the mesmeric trance, the slave of the mesmerizer, as much so as was the genie to the possessor of the wonderful lamp, and he may do with him or her what he pleases. Is there not danger here? May he not use his power in a base way, to gratify his passions, his lusts, his hatred, or his revenge, and with complete impunity, since the somnambulist retains no consciousness or recollection on returning to the normal state, of what passed during the magnetic slumber? Let Animal Magnetism become generally known and practised, and who could know when or where he was safe? Any one of us might at any moment fall a victim, or be made the blind instrument of the basest and most malignant passions of others.”
“Those are idle fears,” replied Dr. P——; “none but virtuous men can exercise the power, or if others can, they can exercise it only for honest and benevolent purposes.”
“That, if true, would be reassuring,” I observed; “but, for myself, I revolt at the bare idea of being so completely in the power of another, however honest or well-disposed he may be. I choose to be my own, and not another’s.”
