These lunatics, for such they must be considered, were not impostors. They had been worked to this degraded state by the plastic power of superstition, and implicit reliance was placed in their assertions; for, as Pascal said, “we must believe people who are ready to have their throats cut.” Whether the Jansenist priests belonged to the same class, I leave to the reader to decide.
Cabanis, in his interesting work, “Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l’Homme,” offers the following remarks on this most curious subject: “Sensibility may be considered in the light of a fluid the quality of which is determined, and which, when carried to certain channels in greater proportion than to others, must of course be diminished in the latter ones. This is evident in all violent affections, but more especially in those ecstasies where the brain and other sympathetic organs are possessed of the highest degree of energetic action, while the faculty of feeling and of motion—in short, the vital powers—seem to have fled from the other parts of the system. In this violent state, fanatics have received with impunity severe wounds, which, if inflicted in a healthy condition, would have proved fatal or most dangerous; for the danger that results from the violent action of external agents on our organs depends on their sensibility, and we daily see poisons, which would be deleterious to a healthy man, innocuous in a state of illness. It was by availing themselves of this physical disposition that impostors of every description, and of every country operated most of their miracles; and it was by these means that the Convulsionists of St. Medard amazed weak imaginations with the blows they received from swords and hatchets, and which in their ascetic language they called consolations. This was the magic wand with which Mesmer overcame habitual sufferings, by giving a fresh direction to the attention, and establishing in constitutions possessed of great mobility a sense of action to which they had been unaccustomed. It was thus also that the Illuminati of France and Germany succeeded in destroying external sensations amongst their adepts, depriving them in fact of their relative existence.”
In these phenomena we do not witness miracles or supernatural agency. Enthusiasts are simply maniacs. Like maniacs, their vital endowments are deranged; they lose the faculty of feeling, of reasoning, of comparing, of associating their ideas; their volition, their memory have fled, and all the functions of organic life are more or less disturbed. Rousseau never proved more clearly that his own intellectual faculties were occasionally impaired, than when he stated “that the state of reflection is unnatural, and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal.”
Insanity may be divided into four species:
1st, Monomania, and melancholy, in which the delirium is confined to one or few objects.
2nd, Mania, where the delirium embraces a variety of impressions, and is accompanied with violence.
3rd, Dementia, or insanity in the full acceptation of the word, where the senses are totally bewildered, and the faculty of thinking destroyed.
4th, Imbecility or idiotcy, where, from imperfect organisation, ratiocination cannot be correct.
To the first of these categories enthusiasts generally belong. Delirium, or wandering, is to a certain extent applicable to all, being a want of correspondence between judgment and perception. Locke and Condillac characterize madness as a false judgment, or a disposition to associate ideas incorrectly, and to mistake them for truths. Hence it is observed by Locke that “Madmen err, as men do that argue right from wrong principles.” Dr. Beattie refers madness to false perception; and Dr. Mason Good, justly remarks, that “the perceptions in madness seem, for anything we know to the contrary, to be frequently as correct as in health, the judgment or reasoning being alone diseased or defective.”
I hope that I may not be accused of materialism when I venture to affirm that all these enthusiasts labour under a physical disease; but whether this state was originally brought on by a morbid condition of the intellectual or the empassioned faculties of the mind, or, in other words, whether a diseased state of the mind brought on a diseased state of the body, I shall not at present venture to decide, as the disquisition would be foreign to the nature of this work, and lead us into investigations of little interest to the generality of readers.