Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/549



was born August 11, 1826, in Blooming Grove, Orange County, N. Y. He grew up in poverty and ignorance, and at seventeen he had received about five months' schooling and had learned to read, write, and do simple sums in arithmetic. He was of average intelligence and had no tastes or ambitions out of the ordinary. In the year 1843, he first heard of animal magnetism, and he was himself magnetised repeatedly by William Levingston, a tailor in Poughkeepsie, where Davis then lived. Davis showed surprising clairvoyant powers while in the magnetic state, and soon he, with Levingston as magnetiser, was using his clairvoyant ability to diagnose cases of sickness and to prescribe remedies. By degrees what he called his "scientific" insight was developed, and soon, his biographer says, "there was no science the general principles and much of minutiæ of which he did not seem to comprehend while in his abnormal state."

On March 7, 1844, Davis fell into a magnetic or "superior" condition without the assistance of the magnetic process, and for two days he was "insensible to external things." He wandered in the Catskill Mountains, and while there he received, "interiorly," information of his future mission.

The following year he went to New York and commenced to lecture, while in the clairvoyant state, Dr. S. S. Lyon of