Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/775

Rh plates of copper or silver or gold was the result of feeble electrical currents excited, or of simple mechanical pressure, or of absorption, they could surely have answered, to the satisfaction of scientific men, the question whether it was to be explained subjectively or objectively; but this, through want of appreciation of the sources of error, or from want of a formula to guide them in their elimination, they failed to do. Even though it should be proved, as it may be, that some of these phenomena observed by Burq, and Charcot, and Westphal are objective, and independent of the expectation of the persons operated on, the validity of this criticism is thereby not at all affected. To attempt to build up a practice of metal-therapeutics on the basis of metalloscopy as that claim now stands, is like putting up a house before we are sure of our foundations. The first question to decide is whether metal-therapeutics is or is not really mental-therapeutics.

In the illustrations for this essay I have chosen, by preference, the experiments of scientific men of skill, honor, and distinction, and for the same reason that Blair, in his work on rhetoric, refers, for examples of incorrectness, inelegance, and carelessness of style, only to the writings of the greatest masters of style in the language: if these things be done in the green trees, what shall be done in those that are utterly dry? The average scientist, the every-day physician, the followers, the gleaners and popularizers of knowledge, are expected to blunder and teach but half truths, if not positive error; but if all those who should be our experts fail us, where can we look for clear ideas? It is no overplus of enthusiasm, no fancy of rhetoric, to say that if these six sources of error and the true methods of providing for them had been mastered half a century ago, the history of scientific experimenting during that time would have been radically different from what it now is.

On this subject no nation can throw stones at another; in all the great centers of modern civilization the strongest leaders of science and scientific thought have been and are constantly demonstrating their non-expertness in the art of experimenting with living human beings; the history of science, or the demonstrably true, and the history of delusions, or the demonstrably false, run in the same channels; but in the minds of the French there appears to be some psychological peculiarity that, while it urges them to undertake, at the same time unfits them to succeed in researches of this character, their very genius for science, as it relates to inanimate nature and the lower forms of life, predisposing them to all error when dealing with living human creatures; hence the paradox of history that France is at once the home of science and the home of delusions. Now, for almost a century, the ablest philosophers and experimenters of France have been wrestling with the problem how to experiment with living human beings; from the first committee of the French Academy on mesmerism, through Perkinism and Burqism, down to the very latest bulletin of Charcot on metalloscopy, it is one uniform, unbroken record of