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and murder, yet they are to be considered, not as vices, but as symptoms of a disease. Therefore, for persons thus afflicted legislators should abolish the punishment of death, cropping, branding, and public whipping, and substitute for them confinement, labor, simple diet, cleanliness, and affectionate treatment. As is shown by the moral effects thus produced in the jail of Philadelpia, the reformation of criminals and the prevention of crimes can be better effected by living than by dead examples."

With such an illuminating work as that of Rush on the "Diseases of the Mind," why was it that this promising school of investigation failed? A general answer was because of the rivalry of the Realists or the Scotch School of Common-Sense Philosophy. Enemies of materialism they accepted as the safest pathway to reality Reid's first principles and Beattie's intuitive, immediate and irresistible impulses. So it came about that they preferred their own unaided introspection to the slow processes of inductive investigation and psycho-physical experimentation. Thus it was that Rush himself was held back by his orthodox realistic training at Princeton and Edinburgh and failed to carry out his principles to their logical conclusion. So too Thomas Jefferson was won over to the Scotch school by the personal influence of Dugald Stewart, although he had boldly stated "I am a Materialist," had agreed with Holbach that man was a machine, and had written to Cabanis that he agreed with his conjecture that the brain secretes thought. But we cannot find here the causes of the decay of materialism despite the aid of the President of the United States and the lectures of such able advocates as Buchanan in Kentucky, and Cooper in South Carolina. These things would lead into a politico-religious description of the times when " the philosophic chief of Monticello" was dubbed "such a heterodox and haughty fellow," and when the promising growth of materialism in the South was destroyed by the realism of the North, that movement which backed chiefly by Princetonians and Presbyterians came down like a glacier and ground out all opposition.

Here then ended the first period of the legitimate practice of mental healing in America. With the next period, that of perversion, we meet with those materialistic occultists who thought to bridge

"Diseases of the Mind," pp. 365-366.

the gap between mind and matter by materializing mind. These in general were attracted by the doctrine of animal magnetism. Taking the spiritus animales of the old fashioned English corporealists like Thomas Hobbes, and combining with that doctrine the eighteenth century notions regarding the electric fluid, they obtained a composite elastic and electric fluid, which had a two-fold function. As an elastic fluid it was the medium of communication between the individual's brain and his body. As an electric fluid it could be projected beyond the limits of the individual, hence arose thought transference, clairvoyance, and mental healing, both local and long distance.

Animal magnetism first became known in America in an adverse way. Benjamin Franklin was one of the French Royal Commission of 1784 which investigated the claims of Mesmer. The report of that committee was to this effect: There is nothing in it. But that was a somewhat biased decision which ignored both the history and the significance of the movement. Mesmerism connected the medical theory of physical affluences and the magnetic-sympathetic system of medicine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As taught by the mystic Paracelsus, this theory was that there was a radiation from all things, but especially the stars, magnets and human bodies, of a force which would act in all things else and which was in each case directed by the indwelling spirit." Given then these "beamy spirits which stream forth invisibly," Mesmer's peculiar service lay in his practical application of these mystical doctrines in the way of psycho-therapeutics. Where he showed his originality was in taking hold of the so-called universal radiating fluid and applying it to the sick by means of contacts and passes. Mesmer's claims were set forth in twenty-seven propositions ultimately derived from his Vienna thesis on the "Influence of the Planets in the Cure of Diseases." Of these propositions the following are pertinent: "A responsive influence exists between the heavenly bodies, the earth and animated bodies. ... A fluid universally diffused, so continuous as not to admit of a vacuum, incomparably subtle, and naturally susceptible of receiving, propagating, and communicating all motor disturbances, is the means of this influence The animal body experiences

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10 Cf. Binet and Féré: "Animal Magnetism," 1898, Chapter I.

...

the alternative effects of this agent, and is directly effected by its insinuation into the substance of the nerves In communicating any method, I shall, by a new theory of matter, demonstrate the universal utility of the principle I seek to establish. Possessed of this knowledge, the physician may judge with certainty of the origin, nature, and progress of diseases, however complicated they may be; he may hinder their development and accomplish their cure without exposing the patient to dangerous and troublesome consequences, irrespective of age, temperament, and sex. . . . This doctrine will, finally, enable the physician to decide upon the health of every individual, and of the presence of the diseases to which he may be exposed. In this way the art of healing may be brought to absolute perfection.'

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Mesmer's doctrines obtained success since they were published at the psychological moment. The popular imagination was stimulated by recent discoveries such as Franklin's invention of the lightning conductor, for some scientific discoveries excite popular superstition by rendering the marvelous probable. Thus it was that Franklinism, or the theory of the electric fluid as a subtle, universally diffused fluid, indirectly fastened the belief in animal magnetism. Yet the American natural philosopher himself was anything but favorable to that belief. In fact his name heads the list of the royal commissioners whose report concluded as follows: "The commissioners have ascertained that the animal magnetic fluid is not perceptible by any of the senses; that it has no action, either on themselves or on the patients subjected to it. They are convinced that pressure and contact effect changes which are rarely favorable to the animal system, and which injuriously affect the imagination. Finally, they have demonstrated by decisive experiments that imagination apart from magnetism produces convulsions, and that magnetism without imagination produces nothing."

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These men were learned, but they missed an opportunity; in a word they threw out the baby with the bath. Confused by Mes⚫mer's complicated apparatus of tractors and baquets magnetiques, they failed to perceive the true principle of suggestion at the

"Binet and Féré: 12 Binet and Féré:

"Animal Magnetism," pp. 5-7.
"Animal Magnetism," pp. 16-17.

bottom of all that rubbish. They were right in denying any such objective entity as a transferable curative principle; they were wrong in denying the correlative subjective principle, namely that through suggestion the subject may regain his nervous stability, relieve himself of mental overtension, and so tone up the system as to hasten the process of cure even in organic troubles.

Animal magnetism in America received one black eye at the hands of Franklin. It received another with the advent of the Scotch realists, especially of the Princeton school. The first of these was John Witherspoon who, as president of the College of New Jersey, delivered the opinion, that, while the body and spirit have a great reciprocal influence upon one another; the body on the temper and disposition of the soul, the soul on the state and habit of the body, yet the body is properly the minister of the soul, the means of conveying perceptions to it, but nothing without it. Other Princetonians repeated these opinions, but how they spread to the North and South is another story. As Jefferson said, the pious young monks of Harvard and Yale who came into the Valley of Virginia were too much for him; hence he had no desire to thrust his head into that hornets' nest, the genus irritabile vatum.

With two black eyes, one from the practical Franklin, and the other from the Scotch School of Common-Sense, animal magnetism was not fit to appear in public for some time. Nevertheless with another generation it was again introduced into the country in a fashion that can best be traced through its connections with primitive Christian Science. It was in 1837 that a Frenchman, Charles Poyen, who had been cured "mesmerically" of a nervous disorder, published his "Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England." In this he tells of his travels in the very towns of Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire, where Mrs. Mary Baker Glover Eddy later lectured and practised. That she was conversant with what he taught is likely from the similarity between his six mesmeric phenomena and the elements of her teaching. His "suspension of the external sensibility" was her "unconsciousness." His "intimate connection with the magnetizer" was her "mesmeric connection between you both." His "influence of the will" was her "will power." His "communication of thought" was her "absent treatment." His "clairvoyance" was her belief that "the mesmerized subject sees with

closed eyes." His "faculty for seizing the symptoms of disease and prescribing the proper remedies for them" was what she meant by "healing the sick without seeing them."

In the same year as Poyen's book came Durant's "Exposition, or a New Theory of Animal Magnetism with a Key to the Mysteries." In this animal magnetism is declared to be a "branch of electricity" a science which gives a new life to the religious principle (furnishing unconquerable weapons to Christianity against materialism), creates a new method of pathological investigation and settles therapeutics on a basis hitherto unknown to the medical world." Within another generation an Americanized form of mesmerism-Dr. Grimes' electro-biology-was known to high and low. The poet Whittier was familiar with it, while Mrs. Eddy wrote in the Portland Courier of 1862 as follows: I have employed electro-magnetism and animal magnetism, and for a brief interval have felt relief from the equilibrium which I fancied was restored to an exhausted system, or by a difference of concentrated action, but in no instance did I get rid of a return of all my ailments, because I had not been helped out of the error in which opinions involved me." This confession has been used by the opponents of Mrs. Eddy in the attempt to prove that she stole her doctrines from the Portland magnetic healer Quimby. At first sight Eddyism might seem to be nothing but Quimbyism. He taught a "Science of Health "; she wrote "Science and Health": both employed the term "Christian Science." Again Mrs. Eddy has her "reversed statements," propositions which are offered as self-evident because they read backward. She propounds this concatenation: "There is no pain in Truth, and no Truth in pain; no matter in mind and no mind in matter; no nerve in Intelligence and no Intelligence in nerve; no matter in Spirit and no Spirit in matter." Similar patent reversibles are to be found in Quimby's "Science of Man": "Error is sickness, Truth is health; Error is matter, Truth is God; God is right, Error is wrong."

Finally there are many points of resemblance between Quimby's Portland circular of 1859 and Mrs. Eddy's defence of his system in 1862. The former alleged, "My practice is unlike all medical practice. . . . I give no medicines, and make no outward applications, but simply sit by the patient, tell him what he thinks is his disease, and my explanation is the cure. If I succeed in cor

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