CHAPTER VI

A treatise on mesmerism

Towards the end of the eighteenth century science was sundered as widely by the apparition of Mesmer as art had been by that of Gluck.  After re-discovering magnetism Mesmer came to France, where, from time immemorial, inventors have flocked to obtain recognition for their discoveries.  France, thanks to her lucid language, is in some sense the clarion of the world.

“If homoeopathy gets to Paris it is saved,” said Hahnemann, recently.

“Go to France,” said Monsieur de Metternich to Gall, “and if they laugh at your bumps you will be famous.”

Mesmer had disciples and antagonists as ardent for and against his theories as the Piccinists and the Gluckists for theirs.  Scientific France was stirred to its center; a solemn conclave was opened.  Before judgment was rendered, the medical faculty proscribed, in a body, Mesmer’s so-called charlatanism, his tub, his conducting wires, and his theory.  But let us at once admit that the German, unfortunately, compromised his splendid discovery by enormous pecuniary claims.  Mesmer was defeated by the doubtfulness of facts, by universal ignorance of the part played in nature by imponderable fluids then unobserved, and by his own inability to study on all sides a science possessing a triple front.  Magnetism has many applications; in Mesmer’s hands it was, in its relation to the future, merely what cause is to effect.  But, if the discoverer lacked genius, it is a sad thing both for France and for human reason to have to say that a science contemporaneous with civilization, cultivated by Egypt and Chaldea, by Greece and India, met in Paris in the eighteenth century the fate that Truth in the person of Galileo found in the sixteenth; and that magnetism was rejected and cast out by the combined attacks of science and religion, alarmed for their own positions.  Magnetism, the favorite science of Jesus Christ and one of the divine powers which he gave to his disciples, was no better apprehended by the Church than by the disciples of Jean-Jacques, Voltaire, Locke, and Condillac.  The Encyclopedists and the clergy were equally averse to the old human power which they took to be new.  The miracles of the convulsionaries, suppressed by the Church and smothered by the indifference of scientific men (in spite of the precious writings of the Councilor, Carre de Montgeron) were the first summons to make experiments with those human fluids which give power to employ certain inward forces to neutralize the sufferings caused by outward agents.  But to do this it was necessary to admit the existence of fluids intangible, invisible, imponderable, three negative terms in which the science of that day chose to see a definition of the void.  In modern philosophy there is no void.  Ten feet of void and the world crumbles away!  To materialists especially the world is full, all things hang together, are linked, related, organized.  “The world as the result of chance,” said Diderot, “is more explicable than God.  The multiplicity of causes, the incalculable number of issues presupposed by chance, explain creation.  Take the Eneid and all the letters composing it; if you allow me time and space, I can, by continuing to cast the letters, arrive at last at the Eneid combination.”