Page:The Quimby Manuscripts.djvu/50

46 So far as Lucius is able to follow, such cases merely show Mr. Quimby's power to exert “magnetic influence,” whatever that was supposed to be. He speaks, for example, of a patient to whom Quimby was taken by a Dr. Richardson. “The case was that of a woman who fell down and injured the elbow joint so that she couldn't move it without excruciating pain. He magnetised her and made her move her arm about just as he pleased without any pain.”

Turning to Mr. Quimby's own account of his experiments, we find once more that what Quimby was interested in was not the alleged “magnetism,” but the activities which resulted when a subject or patient accepted a certain idea and responded to it. For example, in an article dated 1863, Mr. Quimby states that he found his mesmeric subject possessing a psychical sense of smell such that Lucius could not only detect any odor at a distance, but “describe the flower or person that threw the odor.” Noticing Lucius's responsiveness to what he had perceived, or at other times merely thought he perceived, Mr. Quimby resolved to try an experiment of another sort, namely, to prove that similar consequences would follow when there was no real object at all, but merely an idea.

“I said,” writes Mr. Quimby, that “I could create objects that my subject could see. So, of course I could create things that would frighten him, and I could create all kinds of fruit which he would eat and be affected by. For instance, when awake he was very fond of lemons, and was always eating them. I thought I would break him of it. So when I had him asleep I would create mentally a lemon, and he would see it. Then I would make him eat it till he would be so sick that he would vomit. Then he would beg me not to make him eat any more lemons. I never mentioned the conversation to him in his waking state. After trying the experiment two or three times, it destroyed his taste for lemons, and he had no desire for them and could not even bear the taste of them.”

From this experiment Mr. Quimby infers that “ideas that cannot be seen are as as real as those which can be seen. . . Then man can account for his troubles as easily as he can account for injuries caused by an accident. . . . Some ideas contain no intelligence because the author puts none in them.” If a subject or a patient can be unpleasantly affected