Man is essentially a spiritual being, and, even in this life, he has many of the spiritual capacities which are to be unfolded in the higher life. Moreover, there are in every refined constitution a great number of delicate sensibilities, which no college has ever recognized.
There has been no concealment of these facts. They have always been open to observation,—more open than the facts of Geology and Chemistry. Ever since the earliest dawn of civilization in Egypt, India, and Greece the facts have been conspicuous before the world, and, in ancient times, have attracted the attention of imperial and republican governments. And yet, the literary guild, the incorporated officials of education everywhere, have refused to investigate such truths, and shaped their policy in accordance with the lowest instincts of mammon,—in accordance with the policy of kings, of priests, of soldiers, and of plutocrats; and this policy has been so firmly maintained and transmitted, that there is not, to-day, a university anywhere to be found that possesses the spirit of progress, or is willing to open either its eyes or its ears to the illumination of nineteenth-century progress, and to the voice of Heaven, which is “the still small voice of reason.”
“Of the earth, earthy” is the character of our colleges to-day as it was in the days when Prof. Horky and his colleagues refused to look through the telescope of Galileo. Is not this utter neglect of Psychometry for forty-five years (because it has not been forced upon their attention) as great an evidence of perpetuated stolidity as was the conduct of the Professors of Padua 280 years ago in shunning the inspection of Galileo’s telescope, when the demonstration has been so often repeated that Psychometry is a far greater addition than the telescope to the methods of science and promises a greater enlargement of science than the telescope and microscope combined.
“Of the earth, earthy” is a just description of institutions which confine their investigations and limit their ideas of science to that which is physical, when man’s life, enjoyment, hopes and destiny are all above the plane on which they dwell and in which they burrow. Physical science is indeed a vast department of knowledge, but to limit ourselves to that when a far grander realm exists, one really more important to human welfare, is an attempt to perpetuate a semi-barbarism, and the time is not very remote in this progressive age when the barbarism of the 19th century literature and education will become a familiar theme.
The efforts of intellectual rebels to break through the restrictions of collegiate despotism have not yet had much success, and my own labors would have been fruitless in that respect if I had not been able to combine with others in establishing a more liberal college, the Eclectic Medical Institute of Cincinnati, which still retains something of the progressive spirit of its founders.
Simultaneously with the American rebellion against British authority, Mesmer in France made an assault upon that Chinese wall of medical bigotry which Harvey found it so hard to overcome, but although he secured one favorable report from the Medical Academy at Paris, he was never admitted to an honorable recognition. Now, however, the baffled truth has entered the citadel of professional authority and the correspondent of the New York Tribune tells the story as follows:
Charcot Avenges Mesmer.
Under this heading the New York Tribune published in September the letter of its regular correspondent at Paris, which is given below:
It shows that in the present state of imperfect civilization the narrow-minded men who generally lead society are perfectly able to suppress for a time any discovery which does not come from their own clique. And when they do yield to the force of evidence and accept extraordinary new discoveries, they either do it in a blundering and perverted manner, or they try to appropriate it as their own and continue to rob the pioneer thinker.
The psychometric experiments of Drs. Bourru and Burot, Dr. Luys and others have not been conducted in the scientific and satisfactory manner in which I introduced them in 1841, but in the hysterical and sensational manner which is now attracting attention.