ence, and as another person. He has consciousness and sensation, but they differ greatly from those of his nor- mal condition. He hears oidy the voice of his magnet- izer, or of some person in contact with him. The mag- netizer can make his muscles rigid in almost any posi- tion, and has the power of governing his physical mo- tions. His oAvn senses of touch, taste, and smell appear to be dormant, but he perceives all the impressions pro- duced on those senses in the magnetizer's frame. The fifth stage is that of clairvoyance. This is a heightened condition of the fourth stage. The patient has means of perception unknown to man in his normal state, and so singular that the assertion of their possession, meas- lured by the general experience of the race, appears to be an impudent falsehood or imposture. The somnam- bulist can see with his eyes closed and bandaged ; he can then even see what waking men in his place can not see with their eyes open. He can read the contents of letters unopened ; he can see through clothing, wood and metal boxes, and walls of brick or stone ; he can tell what is going on in the room above him or in the room below. Sometimes the sense of sight, or a faculty capable of perceiving things which the normal man perceives only by means of the organ of vision, seems to reside in the forehead, in the back-head, in the fingers, or in the knuckles of the hand. Thus the clairvoyant will sometimes move about holding his fist in front of him for the purpose of seeing where he is going. How this means of perception can exist apart from the organs of vision, why it exists in one part of the body more than another, and why one should have it in the hand, an- other in the forehead, and a third in the back-head, are questions very proper to be asked, but to which there is no satisfactorj' answer. . . . The clairvoyant not only sees things outside of his body, but even in it. His whole physical frame is transparent to him ; he looks through and sees all the functions of life as though they were going on in a glass case. He can see through the bodies of others placed in magnetic connection with him in the same way. Frequently he will describe, with the accuracy of high anatomical, physiological, and pathological knowledge, the operations of healthy and diseased organs ; and will even prescribe remedies for disease." While in this state the functions of the body are liable to be much affected — the pulsations of the heart and the respirations are quickened or retarded, and the secretions altered, and that chiefly at the will of the operator. At his direction the limbs are made rigid, or become endowed with unnatural strength ; one liquid tastes as any other, and is hot or cold, sweet or bitter, as the subject is told; in short, every thought, sensation, and movement of the subject obeys (he behest of the mesmerizer, if we may take the word of mesmerists for the subject's experience. The sixth and last stage, finally, the mesmerists claim to be that of " perfect clairvoyance," and a far more exalted position than the fifth. "The perfect clairv-oyant," we are told, "sees what is going on at a distance of hundreds of miles, reads the thoughts of all persons about him, reads the past, and can truly foretell the future. His soul dwells in light and delight ; he often regrets that he cannot continue in that state forever; he shudders at the ne- cessity of being brought down into the dull, tiresome, base world of normal life." Between these different stages of the mesmeric condition, as here described, n6 precise line can be drawn. The transition from one stage to the other is gradual, and generally impercepti- ble at the time. Thus many of the characteristics of the clairvoyant stage belong also to the somnambulic stage, in which they are, indeed, most frequently ob- served.
These are the phenomena alleged by mesmerists. To say that they are not true statements, or to decide which only are true, if any there be that are false, does not lie within our domain as encyclopaedists, but it may be well enough to state here that physiologists, physicians, and savans are pretty well agreed that the notion of a force
MESMERISM
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JklESMERISM
of any kind whatever proceeding in such cases from a person, or I'rom a magnotizinj; aijparatus, is a delusion. The effects, whatever they are, must have their cause somewhere else. ^Vhere it is to be looked for was al- ready indicated in the earliest days of mesmerism by the committee appointed by the French government, who closed their report by saying, '• the effects actmiUn produced tcere produced pureli/ bij the imaf;i)uitioii." This part of the science of human nature — the rctlex action of the mental upon the jyhysical — had not then, hovvever,bcensufhcicntly stuiliid. and is not now widely enough known to render tlic cini.liisinii of the reporters a satisfactory explanation ot ihc- pluiK.incna; and the fallacies of mesmerism, though subjected to many sim- ilar exposures (Dr. Falkoner, of Hath, e. g., annihilated the patent metallic tractors of I'erkiu by making wooden ones exactly like them, which produced exactly the same effects), have constantly revivetl in some shape or other. One chief cause of the inveteracy of the delusion is that the ojjponents of mesmerism do not distinguish between denying tlie theory of the mesmerists and the facts which that theory pretends to explain, and have been too ready to ascribe the whole to delusion and fraud. It thus happens that the most sceptical often become all of a sudden the most credulous. Finding that things do actually happen which they cannot ex- plain, and had been accustomed to denounce as impos- tures, they rush to the other extreme, and embrace not only the facts but the theory, and call this, too, believ- ing the evidence of their senses. Now the reality of the greater part of the manifestations appealed to by the mesmerist must be admitted, though we deny his explanation of them ; and even where their reality must be denied, it does not follow that the mesmerist is not sincere in believing them ; there is only greater room than in any other case for suspecting that he has de- ceived himself.