Part 23

It is not truth alone that has the privilege of rendering men passionate. Such was the legitimate result of these retrospective views. I now ask myself whether, by labouring to put the truth of this aphorism in full light, the passionate advocate of Mesmerism showed proof of ability!

Gentlemen, let us put all these personal attacks aside, all these recriminations against science and its agents, who unfortunately had not succeeded in restoring the health of the morose magistrate. What remains then of his pamphlet? Two chapters, only two chapters, in which Bailly's report is treated seriously. The medical commissioners and the members of the Academy had not seen, in the real effects of Mesmerism anything more than was occasioned by imagination. The celebrated magistrate exclaims on this subject, "Any one hearing this proposition spoken of would suppose, before reading the report, that the commissioners had treated and cured, or considerably relieved by the force of imagination, large tumours, inveterate obstructions, gutta serenas, and strong paralyses." Servan admitted, in short, that magnetism had effected most wonderful cures. But there lay all the question. The cures being admitted, the rest followed as a matter of course.

However incredible these cures might be, they must be admitted, they said, when numerous witnesses certified their truth. Was it owing to chance that attestations were wanting for the miracles at the Cemetery of St. Medard? Did not the counsellor to the parliament, Montgeron, state, in three large quarto volumes, the names of a great multitude of individuals who protested on their honour as illuminati, that the tomb of the Deacon, Paris, had restored sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, strength to the paralytic; that in a twinkling it cured ailing people of gouty rheumatism, of dropsy, of epilepsy, of phthisis, of abscesses, of ulcers, &c.? Did these attestations, although many emanated from persons of distinction, from the Chevalier Folard, for example, prevent the convulsionists from becoming the laughingstock of Europe? Did they not see the Duchess of Maine herself laugh at their prowess in the following witty couplet?--

"A scavenger at the palace-gate Who, his left heel being lame, Obtained as a most special grace, That his right should ail the same."

Was not government, urged to the utmost, at last obliged to interfere, when the multitude, carrying folly to the extremest bounds, was going to try to resuscitate the dead? In short, do we not remember the amusing distich, affixed at the time to the gate of the Cemetery of St. Medard?--

"By royal decree, we prohibit the gods To work any miracles near to these sods."

Servan must have known better than any one that in regard to testimony, and in questions of complex facts, quality always carries the day over mere numbers; let us add, that quality does not result either from titles of nobility, or from riches, nor from the social position, nor even from a certain sort of celebrity. What we must seek for in a witness is a calmness of mind and of feeling, a store of knowledge, and a very rare thing, notwithstanding the name it bears, common sense; on the other hand, what we must most avoid is the innate taste of some persons for the extraordinary, the wonderful, the paradoxical. Servan did not at all recollect these precepts in the criticism he wrote on Bailly's work.

We have already remarked that the Commissioners of the Academy and of the Faculty did not assert that the Mesmeric meetings were always ineffectual. They only saw in the crises the mere results of imagination; nor did any sort of magnetic fluid reveal itself to their eyes. I will also prove, that imagination alone generated the refutation that Servan gave to Bailly's theory. "You deny," exclaims the attorney-general, "you deny, gentlemen commissioners, the existence of the fluid which Mesmer has made to act such an important part! I maintain, on the contrary, not only that this fluid exists, but also that it is the medium by the aid of which all the vital functions are excited; I assert that imagination is one of the phenomena engendered by this agent; that its greater or less abundance in this or that among our organs, may totally change the normal intellectual state of individuals."

Everybody agrees that too great a flow of blood towards the brain produces a stupefaction of the mind. Analogous or inverse effects might evidently be produced by a subtle, invisible, imponderable fluid, by a sort of nervous fluid, or magnetic fluid (if this term be preferred), circulating through our organs. And the commissioners took good care not to speak on this subject of impossibility. Their thesis was more modest; they contented themselves with saying that nothing demonstrated the existence of such a fluid. Imagination, therefore, had no share in their report; but in Servan's refutation, on the contrary, imagination was the chief actor.

One thing that was still less proved, if possible, than any of those that we have been speaking of, is the influence that the magnetic fluid of the magnetizer might exert on the magnetized person.

In magnetism, properly so called, in that which physicists have studied with so much care and success, the phenomena are constant. They are reproduced exactly under the same conditions of form, of duration, and of quantity, when certain bodies, being present to each other, find themselves exactly in the same relative positions. That is the essential and necessary character of all purely material and mechanical action. Was it thus in the pretended phenomena of animal magnetism? In no way. To-day the crises would occur in the space of some seconds; to-morrow they may require several entire hours; and finally, on another day, other circumstances remaining the same, the effect would be positively null. A certain magnetizer exercised a brisk action on a certain patient, and was absolutely powerless on another who, on the contrary, entered into a crisis under the earliest efforts of a second magnetizer. Instead of one or two universal fluids, there must, then, to explain the phenomena, be as many distinct fluids, and constantly acting, as there exist animated or inanimate beings in the world.

The necessity of such a hypothesis evidently upset Mesmerism from its very foundations; yet the illuminati did not judge thus. All bodies became a focus of special emanations, more or less subtle, more or less abundant, and more or less dissimilar. So far the hypothesis found very few contradictors, even among rigorous minds; but soon these individual corporeal emanations were endowed, relatively towards those, (without the least appearance of proof,) either with a great power of assimilation, or with a decided antagonism, or with a complete neutrality; but they pretended to see in these occult qualities the material causes of the most mysterious affections of the soul. Oh! then doubt had a legitimate right to take possession of all those minds that had been taught by the strict proceedings of science not to rest satisfied with vain words. In the singular system that I have been explaining, when Corneille says,--

"There are some secret knots, some sympathies, By whose relations sweet assorted souls Attach themselves the one to the other...."

and when the celebrated Spanish Jesuit Balthazar Gracian spoke of the natural relationship of minds and hearts, both the one and the other alluded, assuredly without suspecting it, to the mixture, penetration, and easy crossing of two atmospheres.

"I love thee not, Sabidus," wrote Martial, "and I know not why; all that I can tell thee is, that I love thee not." Mesmerists would soon have relieved the poet from his doubts. If Martial loved not Sabidus, it was because their atmospheres could not intermingle without occasioning a kind of storm.

Plutarch informs us that the conqueror of Arminius fainted at the sight of a cock. Antiquity was astonished at this phenomenon. What could be more simple, however? the corporeal emanations of Germanicus and of the cock exercised a repulsive action the one on the other.

The illustrious biographer of Cheronea declares, it is true, that the presence of the cock was not requisite, that its crowing produced exactly the same effect on the adopted son of Tiberius. Now, the crowing may be heard a long way off; the crowing, then, would seem to possess the power of transporting the corporeal emanations of the king of the lower court with great rapidity through space. The thing may appear difficult to believe. As for myself, I think it would be puerile to stop at such a difficulty; have we not leaped high over other difficulties far more embarrassing?

The Marechal d'Albret was still worse off than Germanicus: the atmosphere that made him fall into a syncope exhaled from the head of a wild boar. A live, complete, whole wild boar produced no effect; but on perceiving the head of the animal detached from the body, the Marechal was struck as if with lightning. You see, gentlemen, to what sad trials military men would be exposed, if the Mesmerian theory of atmospheric conflicts were to regain favour. We ought to be carefully on our guard against a ruse de guerre, of which no one till then had ever thought,--that is, against cocks, wild boars, &c.,--for through them an army might suddenly be deprived of its commander-in-chief. "It would also be requisite not to entrust command," Montaigne says, "to men who would fly from apples more than from arquebusades."

It is not only amongst the corpuscular emanations of living animals that the Mesmerists asserted conflicts to occur. They unhesitatingly extended their speculations to dead bodies. Some ancients dreamt that a catgut cord made of a wolf's intestines would never strike in unison with one made from a lamb's intestine; a discord of atmospheres renders the phenomenon possible. It is still a conflict of corporeal emanations that explains the other aphorism of an ancient philosopher: "The sound of a drum made with a wolf's skin takes away all sonorousness from a drum made with a lamb's skin."

Here I pause, Gentlemen. Montesquieu said: "When God created the brains of human beings, he did not intend to guarantee them."

To conclude: Servan's witty, piquant, agreeably written pamphlet was worthy under this triple claim of the reception with which the public honoured it; but it did not shake, in any one part, the lucid, majestic, elegant report by Bailly. The magistrate of Grenoble has said, that in his long experience he had met men accustomed to reflect without laughing, and other men who only wished to laugh without reflecting. Bailly thought of the first class when he wrote his memorable report. The Doubts of the Provincial man were destined only for the other class.

It was also to these light and laughing souls that Servan exclusively addressed himself some time after, if it be true that the Queries of the young Doctor Rhubarbini de Purgandis were written by him.

Rhubarbini de Purgandis sets to work manfully. In his opinion the report by Franklin, by Lavoisier, by Bailly, is, in the scientific life of those learned men, what the Monades were for Leibnitz, the Whirlwinds for Descartes, the Commentary on the Apocalypse for Newton. These examples may enable us to judge of the rest, and render all farther refutation unnecessary.

Bailly's report destroyed root and branch the ideas, the systems, the practices of Mesmer and of his adepts. Let us add sincerely that we have no right to appeal to him in regard to modern somnambulism. The greater portion of the phenomena now grouped around that name were neither known nor announced in 1783. A magnetizer certainly says the most improbable thing in the world, when he affirms that a given individual in the state of somnambulism can see every thing in the most profound darkness, that he can read through a wall, and even without the help of his eyes. But the improbability of these announcements does not result from the celebrated report, for Bailly does not mention such marvels, neither in praise nor dispraise; he does not say one word about them. The physicist, the doctor, the merely curious man who gives himself up to experiments in somnambulism, who thinks he must examine whether, in certain states of nervous excitement, some individuals are really endowed with extraordinary faculties; with the faculty, for example, of reading with their stomach, or with their heel; people who wish to know exactly up to what point the phenomena so boldly asserted by the magnetizers of our epoch may be within the domain of rogues and sharks; all such people, we say, do not at all deny the authority of the subject in question, nor do they put themselves really in opposition to the Lavoisiers, the Franklins, or the Baillys; they dive into an entirely new world, of which those illustrious learned men did not even suspect the existence.

I cannot approve of the mystery adopted by some grave learned men, who, in the present day, attend experiments on somnambulism. Doubt is a proof of diffidence, and has rarely been inimical to the progress of science. We could not say the same of incredulity. He who, except in pure mathematics, pronounces the word impossible, is deficient in prudence. Reserve is especially requisite when we treat of animal organization.

Our senses, notwithstanding twenty-four centuries of study, observations, and researches, are far from being an exhausted subject. Take, for example, the ear. A celebrated natural philosopher, Wollaston, occupied himself with it; and immediately we learn, that with an equal sensibility as regards the low notes a certain individual can hear the highest tones, whilst another cannot hear them at all; and it becomes proved that certain men, with perfectly sound organs, never heard the cricket in the chimney-corner, yet did not doubt but that bats occasionally utter a piercing cry; and attention being once awakened to these singular results, observers have found the most extraordinary differences of sensibility between their right ear and their left ear, &c.

Our vision offers phenomena not less curious, and an infinitely vaster field of research. Experience has proved, for example, that some people are absolutely blind to certain colours, as red, and enjoy perfect vision relatively to yellow, to green, and to blue. If the Newtonian theory of emission be true, we must irrevocably admit that a ray ceases to be light as soon as we diminish its velocity by one ten thousandth part. Thence flow those natural conjectures, which are well worthy of experimental examination: all men do not see by the same rays; decided differences may exist in this respect in the same individual during various nervous states; it is possible that the calorific rays, the dark rays of one person, may be the luminous rays of another person, and reciprocally; the calorific rays traverse some substances freely, which are therefore called diathermal, these substances, thus far, had been called opaque, because they transmit no ray commonly called luminous; now the words opaque and diathermal have no absolute meaning. The diathermals allow those rays to pass through which constitute the light of one man; and they stop those which constitute the light of another man. Perhaps in this way the key of many phenomena might be found, that till now have remained without any plausible explanation.

Nothing, in the marvels of somnambulism, raised more doubts than an oft-repeated assertion, relative to the power which certain persons are said to possess in a state of crisis, of deciphering a letter at a distance with the foot, the nape of the neck, or the stomach. The word impossible in this instance seemed quite legitimate. Still, I do not doubt but some rigid minds would withhold it after having reflected on the ingenious experiments by which Moser produces, also at a distance, very distinct images of all sorts of objects, on all sorts of bodies, and in the most complete darkness.