Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/634

616 when placed on the front seat of the carriage, pleases himself with the fancy that he is guiding the horse, when all the time his strong father behind him is quietly holding and pulling the reins. In all experiments with living human beings, as in the special branch that we call therapeutics, it is oftentimes not what we do, but how we do it, that determines the results.

As regards this first point—the action of mind on body—I may say that, by a series of experiments not yet published, but a brief abstract of which has been twice presented to this Association, it has been proved that, by properly turning the mind of the patient on his body, through excitations of the emotions of wonder and special expectation, it is possible not only to relieve for the time various functional diseases, but in many instances to perfectly and permanently cure them; and it was also shown that organic or structural diseases may be relieved in the same way, in some cases, more satisfactorily than by any objective medical treatment whatever. The method by which the emotions are to be acted upon for the purposes of mental therapeutics are now so far organized into a science that any one who will make himself practically familiar with the subject can obtain the same results. The first mistake of Charcot and his coadjutors in France, and his followers in England and in Germany, was in assuming that such effects as the orderly, uniform reappearance of the sense of the different colors in hysterical women, and the symmetrical transference of sensory phenomena from one side of the body to the other, under the local application of metallic disks in hemianæsthesia, could not be produced subjectively by the mind of the patient. Such an assumption would never have been made by any one who had performed or witnessed the experiments in mental therapeutics of which I have spoken; for, again and again, not only in hysteria, but in other forms of disease, and in conditions not distinctively nervous, I have obtained results which, in definiteness, in quantity, and in permanence, are far more imposing, proving beyond question that, when all the sources of error were considered and provided for, the results were entirely independent of any objective power in the means employed—were, in short, subjective purely; applications of metals, or wood, or paper, or no applications at all, provided the subject expected them, being equally effective.

Science is not a matter of opinion; its very essence is demonstration; and the question whether, in any given experiments, the results are subjective or objective, can be brought entirely out of all discussion and all opinion, provided the elements of error are understood and avoided. Indeed, all discussion in scientific matters must be, in logical strictness, unscientific: if we know anything, there may be need for statement, of explanation, of illustration, but none for discussion; if we do not know, the course of wisdom is to keep silence until we do. With the formulated six sources of error before them, and the methods of protecting themselves against them, the experiments of Charcot