Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/751

Rh process (February 22, 1839) is published in Townshend's "Facts in Mesmerism."

As the limits assigned this essay do not admit a complete review of this little book, it may now be dismissed, but not to oblivion, for it is destined to survive all other writings of Dr. Carpenter, and to be remembered as long as Horkey's letter against Galileo. Posterity will be amused to think that Whately's "historic Doubts" concerning the existence of Napoleon Bonaparte, written for amusement, were more than matched by Carpenter's doubts of the existence of any mesmeric or spiritual facts, written in all the earnestness of a dogmatic and infallible philosophizer. In the struggle between stubborn vituperative materialism and comprehensive science, the battle-ground is at the psycho-physiological junction of the two worlds. Man, belonging to both the spiritual and the material world, cannot be properly studied except as a psycho-physiological being, and those who refuse to do this simply ignore anthropology. The effort of ultra-bigoted materialists is to exclude all agencies not thoroughly material—all that is intermediate between the psychic and the physiological—to crush its students and teachers by personal or professional ostracism and accusations of lying knavery and hallucination. The malignity of the attacks is sufficient proof that they do not originate in the love of science or of truth, even if they were not often distinguished by mendacity, the mildest example of which is the late assertion of Dr. Forbes Winslow, of London, that "this form of delusion" (spiritualism) "is very prevalent in America, and the asylums contain many of its victims; nearly 10,000 persons having gone insane on the subject are confined in the public asylums of the United States." This is quite a fair example of the truthfulness of the majority of the statements on that side of the question. The fact is, however, that the published reports of our fifty-eight insane asylums show but 412 from religious excitement, which is less than two per cent, of the whole number, and but 59 from spiritualism, which is twenty-six hundredths of one per cent, of the whole number in these asylums (23,328).

Dr. Carpenter and the majority of physiologists prefer to cultivate physiology as a purely material science, and reduce man as nearly as possible to a chemical and dynamic apparatus. I have preferred to cultivate physiology in a more philosophic way, recognizing the eternal man who inhabits the body, as well as the transient physical form, and discovering a new class of facts which render our chemical and anatomical physiology far more philosophic and intelligible. What a blind groping in the dark rigidly materialistic physiology appears to one who has gained that full knowledge of our complex constitution which constitutes our anthropology! I do not mean by this that mesmerism and spiritualism combined with mechanical physiology constitute anthropology: far from it. Both mesmerism and