"A scavenger at the palace-gate
Who, his left heel being lame,
Obtained as a most special grace,
That his right should ail the same."[9]
Was not government, urged to the utmost, at last obliged to interfere, when the multitude, carrying folly to the extremest bounds, was going to try to resuscitate the dead? In short, do we not remember the amusing distich, affixed at the time to the gate of the Cemetery of St. Médard?—
"By royal decree, we prohibit the gods
To work any miracles near to these sods."[10]
Servan must have known better than any one that in regard to testimony, and in questions of complex facts, quality always carries the day over mere numbers; let us add, that quality does not result either from titles of nobility, or from riches, nor from the social position, nor even from a certain sort of celebrity. What we must seek for in a witness is a calmness of mind and of feeling, a store of knowledge, and a very rare thing, notwithstanding the name it bears, common sense; on the other hand, what we must most avoid is the innate taste of some persons for the extraordinary, the wonderful, the paradoxical. Servan did not at all recollect these precepts in the criticism he wrote on Bailly's work.
We have already remarked that the Commissioners of the Academy and of the Faculty did not assert that the Mesmeric meetings were always ineffectual. They only saw in the crises the mere results of imagination; nor did any sort of magnetic fluid reveal itself to their eyes. I will also prove, that imagination alone generated the refutation that Servan gave to Bailly's theory. "You deny," exclaims the attorney-general, "you deny, gentlemen commissioners, the existence of the fluid which Mesmer has made to act such an important part! I maintain, on the contrary, not only that this fluid exists, but also that it is the medium by the aid of which all the vital functions are excited; I assert that imagination is one of the phenomena engendered by this agent; that its greater or less abundance in this or that among our organs, may totally change the normal intellectual state of individuals."
Everybody agrees that too great a flow of blood towards the brain produces a stupefaction of the mind. Analogous or inverse effects might evidently be produced by a subtle, invisible, imponderable fluid, by a sort of nervous fluid, or magnetic fluid (if this term be preferred), circulating through our organs. And the commissioners took good care not to speak on this subject of impossibility. Their thesis was more modest; they contented themselves with saying that nothing demonstrated the existence of such a fluid. Imagination, therefore, had no share in their report; but in Servan's refutation, on the contrary, imagination was the chief actor.