Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 070.djvu/88

82 made use of crutches, was strongly inclined to drink of the Glastonbury waters, which she was assured would care her lameness; the master of the workhouse procured her several bottles of water, which had such an effect that she soon laid aside one crutch, and not long after the other. This was extolled as a miraculous cure; but the man protested to his friends that he had imposed upon her, and fetched water from an ordinary spring.' I need not inform my reader that the force of imagination had spent itself, and she relapsed into her former infirmity."

As Boyle is now rising, let us see if Mesmer himself cannot give him a further lift, and show that one of his cures was as imaginative as that of the old woman of Yeovil. And here, too, be it observed, we have the double weight of a man of extraordinary learning and Mesmer in the scale together.

M. Comte de Gibelin, son of a pastor at Lausanne, and born there in 1727, came to Paris in 1763, where, some years after, he put out proposals for a large work, to be published by subscription, intitled Le Monde Primitif analysé et comparé avec le Monde Moderne; ou Recherches sur l'Antiquité du Monde. The work met with great encouragement, and was extended to 9 vols. in 4to; when, his health being much impaired by severe application to his studies, he was forced to intermit them, and applied to the celebrated magnetic D. M. Mesmer for relief, by whose operations he flattered himself he had received so much, that he addressed a memoir to his subscribers in 1783, reckoned one of the ablest defences of M. Mesmer and his operations. He relapsed, and, being removed to Dr Mesmer's house, died there in 1784, which occasioned the following lines—

Mesmerists say that the commission in Paris appointed to examine into the science made a secret report to the king, contradicting their public condemnation of it. I do not know that this secret report has seen the light. Is it, with the gift of Constantine to Rome, as yet in the moon? Wherever it be, clairvoyance ought to discover it.

Whatever mesmerism is now, in its beginning, if it advances as fast as other sciences, what will become of us under its workings? Will the laws against witchcraft be again in force, and mesmerism come under that denomination? It is frightful to think how rapidly time advances, and brings strange things to pass. In ten, twenty years, what a confusion the world will be in under its power—the consummation of "knowledge is power" all centred in mesmerism. Electricity is probably its great agent. Philosophers say that, if you shake hands, there is an intercommunion of the electric fluid, a mutual participation of sentiment and all the phenomena of mind.

And here I call to mind that, in another part of this paper, I asked what became of the mesmeric influence put on and put off by the wave of the hand. It cannot go through the floor, a non-conductor, or it would not retain power to fasten to it the foot. Admit, then, that in its diffused state it may be too weak to affect the company in the room: what becomes of it—is it floating about, and may be collected? What is to be said if the science shall be advanced to the degree that the mesmeric electric fluid may be concentrated, as in a "Leyden jar?" What a frightful power may be there, more potent than the genie that the fisherman in the Arabian Tale emancipated from the jar that came up in his net. Mesmerism is not under "Solomon's seal." This Leyden jar—contemplate concentrated mesmerism—what will it not do? Will the mesmeriser be enabled to load his jar with any passion-power he pleases—or rather direct the electro- mesmeric fluid, by means of wires, simultaneously to the same phrenological organs in many people? Will he be able to excite universal devotion, or universal combativeness?

Imagination wanders away to new possible camp-meetings, that have had their prototypes in ancient legend; for we may now be but in a lull of sobriety, and awaken to a new and general madness. May the mesmeriser be a Bacchus among his