Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/396

382 and their laughter, like their weeping, often ends in a remarkable excess of excitement.

One of the most interesting phenomena of somnambulism was described thirty years ago by the Englishman Braid. If we put the limbs of a magnetized person into a particular position or the body into a particular attitude, the feelings which correspond with the position or attitude will be called up by it. Thus, if we thrust out the fists of a subject, his features will immediately take on the expression of rage or menace. If we join his hands in the attitude of prayer, he will fall upon his knees, and his features will give the appearance of one who is engaged in supplication. His face thus assumes the true expression of the passions; and no painter, no sculptor, has succeeded in representing terror, disgust, contempt, wrath, amorous tenderness, religious ecstasy, with as much likeness to the life as do somnambulists, even the least intelligent ones, when we excite those feelings in them. This is because the mind, concentrated upon itself, is not disturbed by any of the external causes of excitement which continually and generally without our knowledge impose a restraint upon our internal feelings. The anger of a somnambulist is a typical anger, ideal, and his countenance will wear the expression of it in a high degree according as the feeling that animates him is strong and unmixed.

The magnetizers make wonderful pretensions. They declare that all these facts are of the earth earthy, and, assuming to rise away above their plane, they have imagined that the intelligence of the somnambulists is capable of pulling aside the curtains from the future, of penetrating the mystery of things that are and will be. They have talked of clairvoyance as a power of seeing without the aid of the eyes, as for example of reading a shut book, of hearing without the aid of the ears, of being present at a conversation which is taking place at the same moment at the other end of the world. Justice must be done to these fables; there is nothing supernatural in somnambulism, any more than in the demoniac attack, and no well-demonstrated fact has ever permitted us to conclude that such a thing as double sight or clairvoyance exists. The somnambulists who are exhibited in the theatres and at fairs, as, for example, the celebrated Lucille who was shown several years ago, are really put to sleep, but the condition of genuine somnambulism into which they have fallen does not exclude them from the power of simulating clairvoyance. They are aware of what they are doing, and they know very well that it is their business to divine the future. They are anæsthetic, and we may pinch them, prick them, burn them, without exciting a painful sensation. The phenomena of catalepsy may also be very easily produced upon them. Their intelligence, over-excited by their nervous affections, enables them to find ingenious answers. In a word, the clairvoyants of the theatres and fairs are really asleep, but they are not diviners, only sick persons, and their true place would be in a hospital for the insane.