The rationale of mesmerism

Front matter

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Chapter I. Old And New Theories

It is necessary at the outset that I should explain why I am writing about mesmerism and not about hypnotism. Names are, after all, but tickets put by conventional agreement upon things or branches of knowledge, and if, in the first instance, a hundred years ago, when the matter began to attract notice in Europe, the word "hypnotism" had been adopted to describe certain abnormal conditions of the human body and the human faculties, we need not, at this stage of the proceedings, have quarreled with the expression. But, though it has become so strangely popular quite recently, the term "hypnotism" merely represents, as regards its actual origin, a misconception of the facts relating to the abnormal conditions just mentioned, coupled with a very unworthy disposition to slander the first important exponent of all this knowledge in modern times and to cover a cowardly retreat from denials which had become no longer tenable. In so far as the term "hypnotism " is consciously preferred by some modern investigators, that preference rests on the idea that the earlier belief in the days when nothing of the kind was spoken of except "mesmerism," has been shown by later experience to be scientifically erroneous. The early belief was that something in the nature of a subtle fluid passed from the mesmeric operator to the subject; whereas some experimentalists of the modern school have ascertained that results alleged to have been obtained by mesmerism can be brought about where no operator takes part in the undertaking. Some people by simply working for themselves apparatus of a suitable sort, by gazing, for example, at the rapid flashes of a revolving mirror, or by merely concentrating their attention on a spot of bright light, will be enabled to bring on a certain abnormal, or shall we say cataleptic, condition of their nerves, which will in its turn superinduce anaesthesia, perhaps, or even some imperfect psychic phenomena. But the discovery of these people does not in the smallest degree disprove the other discovery of the earlier mesmerists that a subtle fluid really does pass when an operator, properly qualified himself, is at work, and the fact that this is so is proved by many more experimentalists than have endeavored to maintain the bare hypnotic hypothesis. Further than this, many mesmerists of the higher order entertain no doubt concerning the existence of this fluid, for the simple reason that they can see it.

Sight is a faculty which varies in its penetrative power in a greater degree even than telescopes vary. A tolerably simple experiment to test this may be devised on the following plan : If a spectrum from a ray of sunlight be thrown upon a screen, every one who is acquainted with the most elementary facts of optics will be aware that beyond the colored band of light which is visible, there are invisible rays, the presence of which can be proved by means of photographic paper, and the chemical power of which, indeed, is considerably greater than that of the bright rays actually seen. It is perhaps not so generally known, however, that the power of direct vision extends with some people much further in the direction of those so-called ultra-violet rays than is the case with others. The majority of people, it is true, will come to a tolerably close agreement as to the distance along the colored band of light on the screen which they can see, and if asked to mark the place at which the violet tinge absolutely ceases will mark places that are not very widely apart, but here and there a small percentage of more peculiarly endowed observers will be found to see greatly beyond the usual stopping-place.

Just in the same way other visible phenomena of nature besides rays of violet light melt, so to speak, in others which are not ordinarily visible, and the subtle fluid which emanates from a mesmeric operator is very close to the border-land of the phenomena which every one can see, and therefore can be discerned by, I should think, many more people than will be able to see to any considerable distance into the ultra-violet spectrum. A well-known writer, Baron von Reichenbach, devoted himself especially to this branch of mesmeric inquiry. He has recorded with patient care, for which a pigheaded generation inhabiting the earth about the middle of this century gave him no gratitude, a long series of results obtained with a great many "sensitives" whom he employed, all having to do with their power of seeing visible emanations from human fingers, as also from physical magnetic ap- ' paratus.

Baron von Reichenbach's experiments, properly followed up, would have been found to constitute a complete demonstration of the theory of mesmerism, advanced by Mesmer himself in the first instance, and unreservedly adopted as entirely in harmony with their own extensive observation and practice by his immediate followers, de Puysegur and Deleuze. But before the Baron's time the whole subject had been discredited by reason of the fierce incredulity it encountered at the hands of the orthodox scientific world at the beginning of the century. In the long history of human blundering there can hardly be any example more remarkable than that afforded by the rejection of mesmerism at this period. The facts illustrating the reality of mesmerism issued in torrents from every centre of mesmeric activity, but the passive opposition of bigotry was not to be overcome. Hundreds of people practiced mesmerism, employing it solely as a curative agent; its highest psychic aspects being at that time little understood even by its warmest partisans, and thousands of people benefited by its application. But all the recognized societies and corporations of science were arrayed in arms against it, and professional persecution was the lot of any medical man who identified himself with the new discovery. This persecution in the end stamped it out almost entirely. Some further details on this point will fall most naturally into their place when I come to speak of the early literature of mesmerism, but for the moment I pass on to trace the genesis of the modern view of the subject in connection with which we have to congratulate ourselves on the broad fact, that one of the most important avenues of knowledge open to students of the natural history of humanity is now again available for general use, but in connection with which, except for that broad fact, we have, as a generation, little to be proud of.

Modern writers on hypnotism are almost all building their conclusions on a negation of truth concerning the forces really at work in the production of mesmeric phenomena, and are committed for the most part to a theory which concentrates their attention almost entirely on what is rather a disease of the science they deal with, than the science itself. Nor do I think it a satisfactory plan for people, who know something more of the science in its loftier aspect, to "divide the records of the mind," and say "hypnotism is one thing and mesmerism is another." Of course the experiments practiced at the Salpetriere are one thing and the healthy applications of animal magnetism are another ; hypnotic suggestion is one thing, and the culture of the higher faculties under true mesmerism is another. But people who adopt the expression "hypnotism" mean thereby, or think they mean, to include in its range all that is real and genuine in the discoveries of Mesmer, all that was not imposture and charlatanry in the practice of his immediate successors. Psychic students, therefore, who really understand something of the forces set in action, whether intelligently by the mesmerist or unintelligently by the hypnotist, cannot handle the term as having a departmental significance. It is, as a term employed in connection with this subject, the flag of error, so to speak. We ought not to make peace with it at all.

The general use of the term dates back to Mr. Braid of Manchester, a surgeon who is called by MM. Binet and Fere "the initiator of the scientific study of animal magnetism."

He was really a person who invented a method of thinking which enabled people, thus inclined, to handle and talk about some of the phenomena of mesmerism, without setting themselves in opposition to medical orthodoxy, and without giving up the ungrateful cry that Mesmer was an impostor. For half a century the medical profession had committed itself to the denial of patent facts and the vilification of all who observed and reported them. Mr. Braid, by a bold manoeuvre, possessed himself of some, at any rate, among the facts, and, by putting a forged ticket upon them, justified himself before the world for continuing to vilify their real discoverers — for continuing to swim at ease with the stream of bigotry — and so afforded his confreres an opportunity of escaping from the inconvenience of being at war with notorious experience without incurring the humiliation of confessing that they had previously been in the wrong.

Braid's theory of hypnotism was set forth in the first instance in a little volume from his pen, published in 1843, under the title "Neurypnology; or the Eationale of Nervous Sleep, considered in relation to Animal Magnetism." This was an expansion of an address Mr. Braid delivered at a meeting of the British Association held in Manchester in 1842. The author avows that he was led to his conclusions by certain phenomena he witnessed at a seance conducted by M. Lafontaine, a mesmerist, but he writes rather irritably to maintain the originality of his views that seem at once to have been referred, on their first enunciation, by his critics to previous experimentalists, especially M. Bertrand and the Abbe Faria. He is specially eager to make out that his processes are quite different from anything previously known. He says, "I have now entirely separated hypnotism from animal magnetism. I consider it to be merely a simple, speedy, and certain mode of throwing the nervous system into a new condition which may be rendered eminently available in the cure of certain disorders." He attended M. Lafontaine's seance because he considered mesmeric phenomena "a system of collusion or delusion, or of excited imagination, sympathy or imitation. . . . That night I saw nothing to diminish but rather to confirm my previous prejudices." However, "at the next conversazione, six nights afterwards, one fact, the inability of a patient to open his eyelids, arrested my attention. I considered that to be a real phenomenon."

He watched this case especially and felt assured he had discovered a cause. He at once set to work with experiments of his own to prove "that the inability of the patient to open his eyes was caused by paralyzing the levator muscles of the eyelids, through their continued action during the protracted fixed stare." Operating with subjects of his own and constraining them to fatigue the muscles in question by a prolonged upward gaze, he soon obtained the complete hypnotic trance, together with all the now familiar symptoms — rigidity of the limbs at the command of the operator, great exaltation of the senses, liability to hallucination, imposed by the operator, and curative effects in cases of illness where the hypnotic trance was induced with the curative intention. There is something fairly ludicrous and not a little contemptible in the way Mr. Braid calmly passes on to deal with these phenomena as the results of his method and his discovery, when he sets out with the assumption that everything of the same kind accomplished by his predecessors was imposture, and that he picked out from mesmerism the one fact that was true, — that people could not open their eyes if the levator muscles were paralyzed by previous staring. One can hardly understand how vanity could blind him to the glaring absurdity of his own position. If fatigue of the levator muscles had anything to do with the matter, that cause would not extend to effects ranging beyond the eyelids. Mr. Braid dropped upon the curious facts of phreno-mesmerism, which show different propensities in a mesmerized subject stimulated to unwonted activity by touching the corresponding organs of the brain.

Piety, benevolence, cupidity, can, by his own showing, be played upon in this way with a subject who is "hypnotized," and yet he still keeps in the forefront of his treatise on all experiments of this nature, his original silly guess that the state in which they become possible is due to the fatigue of certain muscles in the eyelids. Mr. Braid in reality must have been a mesmerist of considerable force, without knowing enough of the subject he arrogantly despised to understand the methods by which his results were accomplished ; for he evidently obtained an extraordinarily large percentage of successes with the people he experimented on. But he has received so much undue credit of late from modern writers on the subject, especially in this country, that it is worth while to show, in opposition to the indignant claim for originality he puts forward, that there was nothing original even in his misapprehensions. One of the best — or least objectionable — modern books on the subject, Dr. Moll's "Hypnotism" (translated from the German), skims the history of mesmerism at the outset, and says: "The whole doctrine received a great impetus through the Abbe Faria. ... In 1814-15 he showed by experiments, whose results he published, that no unknown force was necessary for the production of the phenomena; the cause of the sleep, he said, was in the person who was to be sent to sleep; all was subjective." This is the main principle of hypnotism and of suggestion of which Faria, even then, made use in inducing sleep. Two other investigators in France must be mentioned, Bertrand and Noizet, who paved the way for the doctrine of suggestion in spite of much inclination to animal magnetism.

Thus Mr. Braid is glorified in modern articles and books on hypnotism, as the man who extracted the real truth of the subject from the confusion left by foolish enthusiasts or impostors in the beginning, and put us all on a scientific foundation, in spite of the fact that his view is not only a gigantic blunder, absurdly at variance with the facts, even as reported by himself — but even as a blunder, no better than a plagiary.

The Manchester surgeon's reasoning would have been blown to atoms by contemporary critics if it had been opposed to instead of chiming in with conventional prejudice. But fashion soon becomes an ample cloak for bad logic, and, one after another, modern writers, if drawn to the subject of mesmeric phenomena at all, date their chronology from the year 1 of the Braidian era. Even the treatise on "Hypnotism," by Albert Moll, of Berlin, though in some respects *the best of the recent volumes of the Braidian school, is infected with its fundamental principle. I hope to show shortly that the real literature of mesmerism lies in the background, behind the shower of occasional essays brought forth by the vogue of Dr. Charcot's experiments, but it maybe as well, in the first instance, to complete the account I have just given of Braid's own work, by noticing some of those which follow in his footsteps.

Dr. Moll's book is not without merit as an epitome of the subject from the limited modern standpoint. It contains a fairly reasonable and impartial though hasty survey of the rise and progress of mesmerism from the time of Mesmer onward to the present day, also an account of the different methods employed by different schools of mesmerists in inducing the various mesmeric phenomena. The writer chiefly errs in concentrating his attention too much on recent results, and in dealing with the phenomena of hypnotic suggestion as though they constituted an entirely new departure in human knowledge. He justly rebukes some modern scientists who treat hypnotic experiments with contempt, but says "so long as science does not examine everything practically and without prejudice, the great delusions of which animal magnetism, etc. , make use will continue to exist," — thus himself treating with contempt the branches of his own subject with which he happens to be unacquainted. In conclusion, he says : "In spite of the progress which the exact sciences have made, we must not for a moment forget that the inner connection between the body and the mental processes is utterly unknown to us. Under these circumstances we should not refuse to examine the apparently inexplicable . ' ' Certainly the representatives of modern physical science are utterly without knowledge concerning the relations of mind and body, but that is not true of all mankind, as occult students are aware, and the annals of the higher mesmerism go far to point out hopeful paths of investigation in that direction. But the value even of mesmerism as an aid to such researches may be reduced to zero, if we calmly ignore all that the greatest investigators of the past have accomplished, and devote ourselves exclusively to the superficial phenomena rediscovered in the last few years by the hypnotists whose chosen designation marks them out as people who have deliberately elected to ignore the greatest work done by their predecessors.

Two French writers, MM. Alfred Binet and Charles Fere, the latter assistant physician at the Salpetriere in Paris, have published in London a book in English which is called ''Animal Magnetism," perhaps simply to avoid repeating the title " Hypnotism, " already so frequently used ; but it might just as well have been called by the expression so popular for the moment. It is introduced to the reader as written in the environment of the Salpetriere ; it is based^ on the notion that there is but one hypnotism, and that Charcot is its prophet.

The keynote of the volume, as an interpretation of the phenomena it deals with, may be found in the following sentences from the beginning of an early chapter: "As far as its mode of production is concerned, hypnotic sleep does not essentially differ from natural sleep, of which it is in fact only a modification, and all the causes which produce fatigue are capable of producing hypnosis in those who are subject to it. . . . Sensorial excitements produce hypnosis in two ways, — when they are strong and abrupt, or when they are faint and continued for a prolonged period."

It is difficult to criticise such a theory as this in moderate terms. It is difficult to get

OLD ASD NEW THEORIES. 17

behind the mind of a man who can think that a condition in which people can suffer a leg to be cut off without knowing it is something akin to natural sleep and to be properly described as only a modification of it. Certainly in one sense "death and his brother sleep " are akin, but rather in poetic fancy than in the pages of sober science. If one thing is said to be a modification of another, the meaning surely is that it does not differ oreatlv from it in essential character. In the mesmeric trance not only do we meet with astounding effects of anaesthesia. — when a pinch of the arm would be enough to wake anybody from "natural sleep."' — but also an entirely new condition of the intellectual faculties utterly cut off by oblivion before the subject comes out of the trance, from the waking consciousness. "Who has known the natural sleep in which the sleeper is able to converse freely on recondite subjects quite unfamiliar to him in his waking state? and yet it is a common experience of mesmerism that this is possible in the magnetic trance. If MM. Binet and Fere had said, "In the narrow and limited phase of mesmeric conditions, with which we are alone concerned, there is some analogy between what we call hypnosis and ordinary sleep," the statement would hardly be accurate ; but when put forward on the basis of a general assumption that the so-called hypnosis embraces all that is true and real in mesmerism, it is nothing less than absurd.

In fact, the whole theory of the Charcot school depends upon a studious disregard of all the facts of experience that do not square with it. For instance, in the book before us we read of "manoeuvres which formerly led to the belief that it is possible to magnetize from a distance," and then this belief is disposed of by the supposition that in such cases the subject had been told to expect the effect from a distance at a certain time, and therefore the results have only been due to "suggestion in the waking state." In reality all the records of mesmerism, both early and recent, teem with illustrations of the way in which magnetic influence from a distance has been successfully exerted upon persons quite unprepared to expect it. From de Puysegur's time down to some of the recent experiments of the Society for Psychical Research, the fact has been substantiated over and over again, but it does not fit in with the favorite Braid-Charcot hypothesis, so tant pis pour lesfaits as usual.

The more attention we pay to modern writers on hypnotism, the more those of us who are also familiar with the earlier writers will be struck by the fact that above all their other characteristics the modern hypnotists from Braid downwards are not those who have put the investigation of mesmeric phenomena on a scientific basis. They have done just the reverse; they have degraded an inquiry which was opened just a hundred years ago in a truly scientific spirit, into an attempt to bolster up an unintelligent prejudice. For the truly scientific spirit leads people to study all the facts of experience in the particular department of nature concerned, and to refrain from premature theorizing in directions from which some of these facts warn them off. There was no premature theorizing in the case of Mesmer and his followers when they adopted the hypothesis of a mesmeric or magnetic fluid. All the facts known to them up to that time squared with that hypothesis, and if their successors had been loyal to truth and had gone on testing the early hypothesis by later experience they would have found it supported by everything that has been discovered since, and in no way refuted by the discovery that some of the phenomena produced by the agency of the magnetic fluid were also susceptible of being induced — more or less imperfectly — in other ways as well. But latter-day investigators have not been loyal to truth. They have chosen for consideration only those facts and experiences which suited them and have calmly ignored the rest. Incidentally, it is true, they have done a public service ; they have set afloat a general belief that mesmerism after all is a reality, and but for them perhaps it would only at this day have been a reality for isolated students of occult science. But the limitations to which their own theories and methods condemn their thinking are deplorable, and stand at this moment terribly in the way of any real progress in the cultivation of the public mind along the channels of research which mesmerism, correctly appreciated, opens out.

The principle of study, which it is my foremost desire to impress on those who will listen to me, is this: Let all who wish to read about mesmerism go back to the fountain-head of the subject and explore the voluminous writings of the early French school, of which I propose to speak more fully in the next few pages. In that literature the real foundations of our knowledge of mesmerism were laid. There we shall find, it is true, some traces of a most pardonable, if not praiseworthy, excitement and enthusiasm in reference to the wonderful beneficence of the new revelation which mesmeric discoveries seemed to embody. There we shall read of some procedure in which we shall fail to discern the true working of Mesmer's own ideas ; but at the time a prodigious excitement was operative with large numbers of people deeply stirred by wonder and admiration, and many cures were worked through the influence of an overwhelming faith in association with an external ceremonial that probably had little, if any, objective effect. Similar results have been observed within recent years at Lourdes, and only the other day at Treves, in connection with the exhibition of the "Holy Coat." But persons who justly conceive that touching a Holy Coat, of which even the holiness is apocryphal, would not do them any good, make a mistake unworthy of the superior sense they take credit for if they fail to realize th^t full belief in a Holy Coat or a holy anything is a real force within the organisms of the persons inspired by it. Mesmer's baquets and de Puysegur's magnetized trees may not have worked in the same way as the "passes" and magnetic currents with which those early experimentalists sought to coordinate them. But they worked, and therefore the writers in question honestly recorded the facts concerning them, not yet having learned from Mr. Braid and the hypnotizers that the way to put their inquiry on a scientific basis was to pick and choose among the experiences they acquired, so as only to father those which were calculated to please a self-sufficient public opinion around them.

To put aside the writings and experiments that relate to the present distorted revival of mesmerism, under a misleading pseudonym, and to turn back to the pages of de Puysegur and Deleuze, Bicard, Gauthier, Teste, and du Potet, is like passing from an evil and stifling to a pure moral atmosphere.

Chapter II. The Mesmeric Force

Before tracing our way back to the beginnings of modern mesmerism in the veryearliest years of the century, it may be well to pause for a while about half-way back at the stage attained by Baron von Reichenbach. His researches may fairly be taken as the groundwork of a correct theory of mesmerism. The book in which they are all brought out, generally known to students of this sort of literature as "Reichenbach's Researches," bears in reality a somewhat ponderous title. It is called on the title page of the English translation by Dr. Ashburner " Physico-Physiological Researches on the Dynamics of Magnetism, Electricity, Heat, Light, Crystallization, and Chemism in their relations to Vital Force, by Baron Charles von Reichenbach. " The author had lighted on the discovery that sensitives in illness could see luminous emanations or flames issuing from the poles of magnets. At that time, as we shall see later on, the faculties which constitute a person what we now call a sensitive, were supposed to manifest themselves during illness only, and they were sought for by inquirers among persons suffering from some form of sickness. With the painstaking care of a true man of science, Baron von Reichenbach repeated his experiments with magnets with a great number of subjects, taking care of course to test the reality of their power to see what they said they saw, by making them find out his magnets in dark rooms, without having been told where they had been placed, and in other ways. Then he found that the luminous brushes or flames were to be seen emanating from crystals as well as from magnets. The experiments which brought out these facts were elaborate and protracted, but soon acquired a new development almost by accident.

Baron von Reiehenbach discovered that luminous appearances, similar to those emanating from magnets and crystals, proceeded from the human hand in a great many cases, and he dropped upon this fact quite by chance in the first instance, without having set out on this inquiry with any preconceived theory. He was experimenting with one of his sensitives with a magnet in the dark, and she was playing with the luminous flame which she could perceive coming out of the ends, when he in the darkness put his hand between her and the magnet. She immediately began to play in the same way with emanations from the hand, and spoke to the bystanders of five little flames which leaped up and down in the air. She did not see the hand itself, and at first supposed the five little flames to be some independent phenomenon. Other persons present then raised their hands before her, and from various fingers she saw a similar light emitted more or less energetically. This sensitive, Miss Keichel, appears to have been the first in connection with whom Baron von Reichenbach broke down an erroneous belief which had hitherto prevailed with all the earlier mesmerists. As we shall see when coming to review the early literature, almost all the experimentalists, closely following on Mesmer, became possessed of the idea that the clairvoyance they discovered in their patients, and which almost always had reference to the patients' illnesses, was necessarily extinguished on the recovery of health ; and they thus drifted into a way of supposing that the power was in some way morbid in its character, that it related exclusively to pathological conditions, and ceased to be effective when these were no longer present. In reference to Miss Reichel, Baron von Reichenbach announces as a wonderful fact that even after she got well she continued to see the magnetic flames, the crystal light, and the flames on the hand whenever it was dark enough. On inquiry it appeared that she had possessed this faculty even from childhood, and had two sisters" who, like herself, saw these luminous appearances when other persons could see nothing.

Further experiments with other sensitives soon enabled the Baron to generalize as a principle, and to declare, that fiery brushes of light issue from the points of the fingers of healthy men in the same manner as from the poles of crystals. Readers who may take up the Baron's book now, especially with the object of getting information about the vital mesmeric fluid, will be tantalized to find how much more of his attention he devoted to mechanical sources of the luminous effect than to those having direct reference to mesmeric energy. But the truth, is that this characteristic of his research gives it peculiar importance at the present day to students of mesmerism as a science, because it links the vital energy of the human frame with other great forces in nature, and brings our thinking into line with those great philosophical speculations which always seek for unity in nature. A very disjointed and illogical conception of the cosmos is that which regards anything in man as altogether peculiar to himself as a manifestation of nature. Just as his physique is related in various ways to the matter around us out of which it is built up by the subtle chemistry of living organisms, and just as philosophical convictions must force us to the conclusion that the highest spiritual element in the human soul has in some way a common origin with the Universal Spirit from whose energy the whole of what is called creation must have proceeded, so also it is only reasonable to suppose that these intermediate forces with which we are now dealing, the vital forces which are something intermediate in their character between matter and spirit, must themselves be related to some corresponding agent of wide diffusion through the universe.