Baron von Reichenbach's Experiments and Reception. 137

remarkable for openness of mind in the direction of natural science. Those great qualities and strokes of good fortune, however, have not protected him from much injurious treatment: the insolent silence of neglect; the private and social sneer of many scientific circles, where his name would have been pronounced with vast respect, if he had only not dared to venture on untrodden ground; the open but uncandid criticism; the virulent and unreasoning assault; and even the depreciation of his past labours. It is the world-old tragedy of scientific history. No sooner does a man obey the impulse of conscience, and challenge the foregone conclusions of his age, than the hue and cry is raised against him. It is in vain that he shall lavish his good name, his means, his talents, the blood of his heart, the sweat of his brain, everything that is his, upon the working out of the thought by which he has been visited. One word of scorn, one flippant little word, will defraud him of the only outward reward he values, namely the sympathy of his brethren. Why, even if the enthusiast were the laborious and generous victim of some coil of error, he would still deserve the love and furtherance of men, for he is at least casting his life into some breach with bravery worthy of a better task; but being the heavy-laden, and therefore the slowlytreading, perhaps the staggering bearer of a weighty new truth from the heart of Nature to the ears of her frivolous children, they ignore, flout, slander, obstruct, and even hate him. The highest and most enduring reward of scientific exploration, conducted in the spirit of the masters and not in that of the hirelings, is not even the finding of truth; it is the finding of new strength, faith deepened in foundation, more capacious love, and hope building higher and higher. Such assuredly, let all critics and criticasters know and inwardly digest, shall be the mellow lastfruits of this protracted and harassing investigation of Reichenbach's, be the residual amount of scientific truth contained in his books what it may.

These researches have been continued with great industry ever since 1844; and the results of his manifold labours in this direction are now before the world in a large octavo volume, composed of two parts. Dr. Gregory has lately translated and published it for the use of the British public; a service which is doubtless its own reward. The merits of this remarkable volume are great. The painstaking, conscientious, cautious, ingenious, we had almost said the religious, and certainly the self-possessed enthusiasm with which the experimental clew is followed from turn to turn of the labyrinth, is surpassed by nothing of the same sort in the whole range of contemporary science. The moral qualities of a great explorer are displayed by the author in no common degree, with one exception. It is

beneath Von Reichenbach to speak with so much bitterness of spirit against Reymond, his Berlin vituperator, or with such contempt of his young medical opponents in Vienna; although the former is a bully, and the latter are puppies: 'He is there sitting, where they durst not soar.' But his too great animosity against these wretched critics is not the exception referred to. It is a want of respect for the convictions of others; the very crime that is perpetrated against himself. His observations relative to ghostly or spiritual apparitions are little short of insulting to those who believe in such things; and all the more so, that they appeal to the very same kind of evidence as his own discoveries depend upon. Excathedral denunciations of other people's beliefs do not become the writer who exclaims against them in his own case. Ghosts are to be disproved or explained away, or else established and reduced to law, by the same methods of criticism as may be applicable to odylic flames. Then why does he indulge in such woundy contempt for the older school of mesmerism? Its cosmical fluid is as good as his; it is the germ of his one indeed, call it animal magnetism, call it odyle, or call it what he choose. To deface the memory of Mesmer is to disown his own father. Mesmer is the legitimate predecessor of Reichenbach, whether the Baron will or not. It was the doctrine of Mesmer, suggested by a chapter of Van Helmont's, that there radiates from the sun, the moon, the planets, the earth, in short from the whole of nature, a quick and subtle essence, which is not heat, nor light, nor anything else that is known. This secret force was furthermore understood by that speculative physician to be peculiarly resident and concentrated in the common magnet; and partly on that account, partly because the animal nerve was its only known measure or reagent, the fluid itself received the name of animal magnetism. Let us now see what sort of extension the magnetist of Vienna has given to these ideas.

The germinal fact from which this singular investigation has sprouted and grown, till it has become somewhat of a jungle it must be confessed, is very simple considered as a fact; but there are many ways of accounting for it, simple as it looks. When good strong magnets, capable of lifting some ten pounds' weight, are carried slowly down the persons (without touching them) of a score of people taken at random, one or more are sure to be affected by the passes (as they are called) in a notable and a somewhat describable manner. Sometimes so many as three or four such sensitives will be found in that number of subjects. Our author knows an institution where eighteen out of twentytwo women are perceptive of the sensations produced by the passes of the magnet. Many people, who enjoy an average de

Reichenbach's Patients.

139

gree of good health, seem to feel the influence in question. The higher degrees of sensitivity, however, are shewn chiefly by the sickly; folk with weak nerves, the hysteric, the spasmodic, the cataleptic, the epileptic, the paralytic, sleep-walkers, and the insane. As for the very large number of healthy subjects, who displayed considerable and even remarkable sensitivity in the later of Reichenbach's experiments, it is not to be forgotten that the apparently healthy man may well be the subject of an unhealthy diathesis or habit of body. The tendency to fits, somnambulism, and madness may and does exist in thousands, who never shew it to the uninitiated eye :-a thing to be insisted on with all respect for Endlicher the botanist, Schuh the mechanician, Kotschy the traveller, and all the other healthy enough patients of the Baron. The difficulty is to find a family without hereditary morbid dispositions of the constitution; and a considerable, if not a large proportion of those inherited vices must be assigned to the class of nervous disease. This investigation would therefore have been more complete, if the hereditary and acquired predispositions of the so-called healthy patients had been ascertained. It is not a very difficult thing to do; but it is a delicate task, and we must be content without it in this instance. In the meantime, it would be unfair to assume that all the subjects described in the course of those researches are the victims of a neuropathic diathesis, or ill habit of body in the matter of nervous system. The reader may suspect it, but he cannot prove it. It is our own opinion, we confess; but opinions go for nothing in the sciences of observation and induction. At the same time, it is a point which the candid experimentalist in this department will do well to attend to, for it is an inquiry of some importance.

The sensation produced in the excitable by the magnetic pass is represented as being rather unpleasant than agreeable; and it is associated with a slight feeling either of coldness or of warmth, resembling a cool or else a tepid little breeze passing along the line of traction. They sometimes experience a sense of dragging or pricking in the parts under reaction. Formication or the sleeping of a limb is not an uncommon attendant of these experiments. There are some men in the prime of life who perceive this magnetic influence, but women are decidedly more sensitive. It is sometimes vividly felt by children. The most notable of this whole group of magnetic symptoms is the sensation of cold or of heat.

Starting from this primogenitive and obscure fact, our experimentalist has discovered a multitude of related things. He has found that one pole of the magnet produces the sensation of coolness, the other that of warmth. That single crystals of all sorts of

chemical substances, especially when very large and perfect, work the same effects as the magnet. That one pole of the crystalline axis produces coolness, the other warmth. That crystals possessed of more than one axis are also endowed with more than two poles of animal magnetic action; how many axes so many poles. That chemical action is also animal-magnetic; some reactions producing the cool, others the warm sensation, in the sensitive. That light is animal-magnetic precisely in the same way; the light of the sun and sun-stars being cool, that of the moon and planets or moon-stars being warm. That heat, electricity, and galvanism are all capable of giving rise to the animal-magnetic phenomena. That the body of man is peculiarly potent in this way; whence the manipulations or hand-passes of Mesmer and his disciples. That one side of the body produces the cool, the other the warm sensation, in the sensitive. That, in fine, everything in nature, crystalline or uncrystalline, magnetic, chemically active, luminous, cold or hot, dead or living, is capable of yielding similar results: a fact amazingly and suspiciously broad and general.

These things are known only through the reports of subject patients of course; but Reichenbach adduces the testimony of some sixty people, of both sexes, of all ranks, of all degrees of sensitivity, some of them men of science, two or three of them members of the medical profession; and the unvarying agreement of such a number of intelligent people had better not be set too easily aside. Anything like imposture is wholly out of the question. The simplicity, the purity, the precaution, the ingenuity, with which some of the experiments were made, cannot be too much admired; as shall be found when we come to the discussion of the second great fact in the investigation, namely the perception by the sensitives of the odylic lights, as they are called. In the meantime, we accept and believe the fact of the animal-magnetic sensations of cold and heat, as evoked in the sensitives of our investigator by magnets, crystals, chemical mixtures, light, heat, electricity, and everything else.

Before proceeding to the theory of this broad fact, however, let us clearly understand what it is as a fact. The sensation produced is not an actual and ordinary sensation of heat or cold of course. No thermometer, no thermoscope, detects the slightest change of temperature. In a section devoted to the consideration of the difference between the agent of these phenomena (as well as others) and heat, the author is perfectly aware of this. Heat sometimes produces the cold animal-magnetic feeling. The warm radiance of the sun flashing upon a broad metallic plate sends the cool breeze through a long wire to a sensitive in an isolated chamber. In short, this animal-magnetic coolness or warmth is not real in one sense of the word; that is

Braid's Experiments.

141

to say, it is the image of no object. It corresponds with no phenomenon of temperature. It is not a sensation proper; it is a mere quasi-sensation. It is a sensuous illusion. The magnet or the crystal appears to act upon the nerve of the subject in some yet occult way; and one of the effects of that action is the perception of a pseudo-sensation of heat or cold. That pseudosensation is a mere spectral illusion at the very best. Reichenbach knows this. He has even expressed it; but it does appear to the critical student of his work that he does not lay enough stress upon it, perhaps even that it does not seem to have pronounced itself with sufficient emphasis to his mind. He should have iterated and reiterated it all through the book. Neither the writer nor the reader could have held it too constantly and inexorably in view, for thereby hangs a tale.'

So much for the facts themselves; and now for the theory of them. It has just been said that the animal magnet (whether a common magnet, a man's hand, or a crystal) appears to stir, agitate, commove, or act upon the nerve of the sensitive in some yet wholly occult manner; and that one of the effects of that action, one of them, is the perception of a quasi-sensation of heat or of cold in such nerve or nerves. But there are two to a bargain; and even this small amount of claim for the power of the animal magnet is open to reasonable question. Mr. Braid the hypnotist, and also the most searching of the experimental critics of mesmerism, has published a counter-statement. He asserts the principle that the instrument employed, whichsoever of all the so-called animal magnets it may be, has nothing to do with the sensations in question; nothing, that is to say, in the way of direct causation. He can produce precisely similar sensations in certain sorts of people both with and without such an instrument. He takes a patient's hand, lays it on the table with the palm upwards, makes passes from the wrist down the fingers, and the subject soon begins to feel cold or warm, as the case may be, under the lines of passage. He then bids the patient turn away her head, and making believe that he is repeating the experiment, asks her what she feels; and she experiences the very same sensations as before, although no passes are being made. In short, he provokes the same sort of sensations as are described by Von Reichenbach, without the same instrumentation. He has only by word or sign to excite the expectation of the occurrence of such sensations in the patient's mind. Dr. Holland has shewn at large how the direction of the expectant attention to any organ or part of the body excites actions in that part. The mesmerist or hypnotist, as Braid prefers to

*

* Medical Notes and Observations; a truly admirable book of facts and thoughts.