Dr. P—— continued his lectures, private instructions, and experiments for some months, and very soon they began to produce their natural effect. No people are more disposed to run after every novelty, or are naturally more fond of the marvellous than the Anglo-Americans. They live in a constant state of excitement, and are always craving some new stimulant. They have been transplanted from the old homestead, are without ancestors, traditions, old associations, or fixed habits transmitted from generation to generation through a long series of ages. They have descended, in great part, from the sects that separated in the seventeenth century from the Anglican Church, which had in the sixteenth century itself separated from the Church of Rome, and to a great extent broken with antiquity. They are a new people,—in many respects a child-people, with the simplicity, freshness, impressibility, unsteadiness, curiosity, caprice, and waywardness of children. They must have their playthings, and they no sooner obtain a new toy than they tire of it, throw it away, and seek another. Yet are they richly endowed, and they possess in the highest degree many of the nobler virtues of our nature. They are a poetical and imaginative, as well as a reasoning and practical people. They have a robust and not unkindly nature,—are susceptible of deep emotions, and capable of heroic deeds. They treat few subjects with absolute indifference, and seldom fail to give any one who has, or professes to have, something to say, a tolerably fair and patient hearing. Whoever is able to touch their fancy, stir their feelings, excite their curiosity, or their marvellousness, is pretty sure of having them run after him—for a time.
Animal Magnetism soon became the fashion, in the principal towns and villages of the Eastern and Middle States. Old men and women, young men and maidens, boys and girls, of all classes and sizes, were engaged in studying the mesmeric phenomena, and mesmerizing or being mesmerized,—some declaring themselves believers, some expressing modestly their doubts, the majority, while half believing, loudly declaring themselves inveterate sceptics. Jack Wheatley very soon became a famous mesmerizer—for sport. He laughed at the whole concern, and yet he was the most successful of the mesmerizers, and his subjects always behaved with great propriety, seldom, if ever, failing him, or disappointing the wondering spectators. Mr. Winslow, after hesitating a while, began to try experiments himself, and found that he had a wonderful magnetic power, especially over the young misses and spinsters of his congregation. He found by actual experiment, often repeated, and fully attested, that he could mesmerize without being in the same room with his subject, without any previous communication of his intent, and even persons with whom he had no acquaintance, and had never spoken. More than once he had thrown a young lady in an adjoining room into the magnetic slumber. Of this there could be no doubt. He knew well his own intention, and hundreds of witnesses were ready to depose to the fact of the slumber. At first he tried this experiment only upon those who had been previously mesmerized, but he afterwards tried it with brilliant success on others.
But the marvel did not stop here. Mr. Winslow soon found that he could magnetize material objects, which in turn would magnetize persons. He wished to mesmerize a young lady, without communicating to her his wish. He mesmerized a glass of water, which was handed her by a person ignorant of what he had done, and of his intention. She drank of it, and in a very few minutes sank into a profound magnetic slumber, and exhibited the phenomena usually exhibited in artificial somnambulism. When I first heard of this experiment I laughed at it, for it seemed to me a wholly inadmissible fact. I could conceive it possible for mind to act on mind; for the will of the magnetizer to affect the will of the magnetized; but it was repugnant to all received science to suppose that mind or spirit can, without some natural medium, operate on material objects. But from what I subsequently saw and did myself, and what I was assured of by others, both competent and credible, I became convinced that I must admit it, or reject all human testimony.
Mr. Winslow, once become a mesmerizer, very soon left Dr. P—— far behind. In pushing forward his investigations, he found that he could not only throw persons, not indeed every one, but one in twenty-five or thirty, into the mesmeric sleep, render them insensible, dead as it were to all the world except himself, but that he could develop in them, or superinduce upon them, a marvellous physical strength. I saw him place a weak and sickly boy in a chair on the platform of his lecture room, and so nerve his arm that not two of the strongest men could move it. He would, by his mental operation, so nail the chair to the floor that no force applied to it could raise it. He would throw the boy by the same operation upon the floor, render his whole body, neck, legs, arms, fingers, and toes, rigid, and stiff as a crowbar; then suddenly relax all his limbs, and render him as flexible as a reed—now fill him with rage, make him rave furiously, rush through the audience as one possessed, overthrowing every thing and every one in his way—now recall him, soothe his rage, make him cry and weep as if afflicted with the deepest and most inconsolable grief, and now dry at once his tears, and break forth into the wildest and maddest joy.
These were singular phenomena. Whence this apparently superhuman strength? That certainly was no effect of complicity, for the boy exhibited a physical strength far surpassing that of both mesmerizer and mesmerized in their normal state. It could not be the effect of imagination. “For how,” said Mr. Winslow, “can you explain by imagination the effect produced on material objects? You see that I can magnetize a glass of water or a bunch of flowers. Do you pretend that these are endowed with imagination; are not only sensitive, but also intellectual, and even volitive? Have the most common material objects sense, intellect, and will? Imagination, highly excited, may indeed develop and concentrate the strength which one has, but how impart a strength which one has not?”
“I have been studying these wonderful phenomena,” said Mr. Increase Mather Cotton, a rigid puritan minister of high standing, and who had accompanied me to see Mr. Winslow’s experiments, “and I think I see in them the works of the devil.”
“Why, sir,” replied Mr. Winslow, “I do these things myself. My patients move and act, are paralyzed, laugh, cry, weep, rage, foam, run, fly, fight, or make love, at my will. Do you think I am the devil?”
“Be not too confident,” replied Mr. Cotton. “You may yet find that, if not the devil yourself, that it is a devil, and a very base and wicked devil, that moves you, and uses you as the instrument of his malice.”
“I have no belief,” answered Mr. Winslow, “in devils or demons, as separate and intelligent beings.”
“I know very well, sir, that you are a Sadducee, and believe in neither angel nor spirit, although you would fain pass for a Christian minister,” replied, with a severe tone, the stanch puritan, whose great ancestor had taken so conspicuous a part in Salem witchcraft.
“You do me wrong, Mr. Cotton,” replied Mr. Winslow. “I am a Christian, and no Sadducee. I believe in the Christian religion as firmly as you do. I do not deny angel or spirit. By angel I understand what the word itself imports, a messenger, and by spirit, a power, force, or energy. But I do not suppose that I am to understand by either an order of beings distinct and separate from man. I concede the spiritual power or energy, but it is the power or energy of the human being; I grant the demonic character of these phenomena, but the force that produces them is the demonic force of human nature itself. There are no personal angels, and no personal devils or demons.”
“And no personal God, you will say next, I presume,” replied Mr. Cotton with a sneer.
“God is personal in me, in the human personality,” proudly answered Mr. Winslow. “Personality is a circumscription, a limitation; and God, since he is infinite, incapable of circumscription, cannot be personal in himself. He can be personal only in creatures, and consequently, only in such creatures as have personality, that is, men.”
“Your notion of personality is of a piece with your whole miscalled theology,” replied Mr. Cotton. “Personality is the last complement of rational nature. If the nature is rational, that is, capable of intelligent and voluntary activity, and complete, it is a person, and if infinite, an infinite person. Your argument is a mere sophism, founded on a false definition of personality. A little philosophy or common sense would be of great service to such Christian ministers as you are.”
“Let us not,” I interposed, “get involved in a theological discussion. We are to investigate this subject as men of science, not as theologians. We have here a scientific subject, and science leaves theologians to their speculations, without presuming to intervene in their interminable, useless, and wearisome disputes. If your theology is true, it can never be in conflict with science.”
“If your science be true, or really be science,” retorted Mr. Cotton, “it can never be in conflict with theology. I do not attempt to deduce my science from my theology, but I make my theology the mistress of my science. Whatever is inconsistent with it, I know beforehand cannot be genuine science, or true philosophy.”
“That may or may not be so,” I replied; “but I am no theologian. I am an humble cultivator of science, and I consider myself free to push my scientific investigations into all subjects independently, without restraint, without leave asked or obtained either from you or my friend Mr. Winslow. All history has its superstitious and marvellous side. Science has heretofore denied the reality of that side of history, and regarded the marvellous facts with which ancient and mediæval history is filled, as never having really taken place, or as the result of fraud, trickery, or imposture, exaggerated by the credulity, the ignorance, the wonder, and the disordered imaginations of the multitude. These mesmeric phenomena may throw a new light on that class of facts; they may even relieve history from the charges which have been brought against it, and rehabilitate the ages that we have condemned, so far at least as the facts themselves are concerned, though not necessarily as to the theories by which they were in past times generally explained. I am myself at present bewildered. I am not willing to admit the facts, but I am unable to deny them. If they must be accepted, I incline to the view of my friend Mr. Winslow, and am disposed to assume that there is in human nature a law not hitherto well understood, a mysterious power, what he here calls the demonic power of human nature, the limits and extent of which science has not as yet explored.”
“There is something mysterious in man,” remarked Mr. Sandborn, a Universalist minister present. “I remember, some years ago, that one summer I was very much out of health. I suffered much from a bowel complaint, which brought me very low. But my mind was exceedingly active, and I seemed to myself to have not only more than my ordinary intellectual power, but also at my command a mass of information on a great variety of subjects which I was sure I had never acquired in the course of my ordinary studies. I seemed familiar with several physical sciences which I had never studied, and with facts, real facts too, which I had never learned. While I was in this state, I was visited at my residence, in the village of Ithaca, New York, by a young friend, a brother minister, residing some eighteen or twenty miles distant. He saw my state, and urged me to go out and spend a few weeks with him at his boarding-house. The pure breezes, he said, from the hills would do me good, revive my languishing body, and restore me to health. I accepted my young friend’s invitation, and the next morning we took the stage, and after some three hours’ drive were set down at his lodgings. We were hardly seated in his library, when a servant brought him a letter which had been taken from the post-office during his absence. I saw a slight blush on his face as he took the letter, and instantly comprehended that it was from his ‘ladye love,’ although I was entirely ignorant that he was paying his attentions to any one, or that he had any matrimonial intentions. Asking my permission, he broke the seal, and read his letter in my presence. When he had done, I said to him,
“‘You have there a letter from your sweetheart, the young lady to whom you are engaged to be married.’
“‘How do you know that?’ he asked in reply.
“‘O that is evident,’ I replied. ‘I see it in your face. Let me see the letter, and I will tell you her character.’
“‘I would rather not,’ he answered.
“‘I do not wish to read it,’ said I, ‘I only wish to look at the handwriting.’
“‘But can you tell a person’s character by seeing his handwriting.’
“‘Certainly, nothing is easier,’ I replied, although I had never tried, or even heard of such a thing before.
“He then handed me the letter. I fixed my eye on the writing for a moment without reading a word of the letter, and I saw, or seemed to see, standing before me, at some six or eight feet distant, a very good-looking young lady, a little below the medium size, with an agreeable expression of face, apparently about eighteen years of age, as plainly as I see any one of you now in this room. I proceeded quietly and at my ease to describe her to my friend. I told her age, described her size, her height, her complexion, the color and texture of her hair, the colors and quality of her dress, indeed her whole external appearance, even to a hardly perceptible mole on her right cheek. My friend, you may well suppose, listened to me with surprise, astonishment, and wonder, and several times interrupted me with the question ‘Are you really the devil?’ He agreed that my description was accurate, and far more so than he could himself have given.
“I then proceeded, to my friend’s equal astonishment, to describe her moral and intellectual qualities, her disposition, her education, her tastes, her habits, &c., all of which he declared were correctly described, as far as he himself knew. I had never previously seen or heard of the young lady, who lived in another State, and was actually at the moment some hundred and fifty miles distant. But this was not all. My friend married the young lady in the course of two or three months, and two years afterwards I called at his house, and was introduced to a lady whom I instantly recognized as the one whose image I had previously seen before me. There is something in all this, and analogous facts related and well attested by others, that I cannot explain.”
A literal fact, in the experience of the author.
We all agreed that the case was remarkable, and apparently inexplicable, on any known principles of received science.
