Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/174

162 these "sensitives" found their hands so powerfully attracted by magnets or crystals as to be irresistibly drawn toward them; and thus that if the attracting object were forcibly drawn away, not only the hand, but the whole body of the "sensitive" was dragged after it. Another set of facts was adduced to prove the special relation of odyle to terrestrial magnetism—namely, that many "sensitives" cannot sleep in beds which lie across the magnetic meridian; a position at right angles to it being to some quite intolerable.

Von Reichenbach's doctrine came before the British public under the authority of the late Dr. Gregory, the Professor of Chemistry in the University of Edinburgh; who went so far as to affirm that, "by a laborious and beautiful investigation, Reichenbach had demonstrated the existence of a force, influence, or imponderable fluid—whatever name be given to it—which is distinct from all the known forces, influences, or imponderable fluids, such as heat, light, electricity, magnetism, and from the attractions, such as gravitation, or chemical attraction." It at once became apparent, however, to experienced physicians conversant with the proteiform manifestations of that excitable, nervous temperament, of which I have already had to speak, that all these sensations were of the kind which the physiologist terms "subjective;" the state of the sensorium on which they immediately depend being the resultant, not of physical impressions made by external agencies upon the organs of sense, but of cerebral changes connected with the ideas with which the minds of the "sensitives" had come to be "possessed." The very fact that no manifestation of the supposed force could be obtained except through a conscious human organism should have been quite sufficient to suggest to any philosophic investigator that he had to do not with a new physical force, but with a peculiar phase of physical action, by no means unfamiliar to those who had previously studied the influence of the mind upon the body. And the fact which Von Reichenbach himself was honest enough to admit—that when a magnet was poised in a delicate balance, and the hand of a "sensitive" was placed above or beneath it, the magnet was never drawn toward the hand—ought to have convinced him that the force which attracted the "sensitive's" hand to the magnet has nothing in common with physical attractions, whose action is invariably reciprocal; but that it was the product of her own conviction that she must thus approximate it. So "possessed" was he, however, by his pseudo-scientific conception, that the true significance of this fact entirely escaped him; and although he considered that he had taken adequate precautions to exclude the conveyance of any suggestion of which his "sensitives" should be conscious, he never tried the one test which would have been the experimentum crucis in regard to all the supposed influences of magnets—that of using electro-magnets, which could be "made" and "unmade" by completing or breaking the electric circuit,