"Experience also shows, that apparently insulated and lawless phenomena may not only be reduced to a law, but to a well-known law; that many a familiar agent puts on strange disguises; and that events, with which, in their mazy channels, we seem to be unacquainted, may be perfectly recognised by us at their source. Thus galvanism and magnetic force are proved, by recent discoveries, to be only forms of electricity; showing that a fact may be altered, not in itself, but in the circumstances that surround it, and that complexity of development is perfectly consistent with unity of design. Instances like these, while they encourage us to enquiry, should teach us to believe that all which is needed to vindicate the regularity of nature is a more extended observation on our parts."—(Pp. 14-15.)
This is the highest and safest ground for the advocate of mesmerism to tread; to support himself on this he has only to demonstrate his facts beyond the possibility of a doubt, and the truth of the phenomena, however inconsistent with previous experience, must in the end be admitted. But to support him on this high ground his proof must be demonstrative; he must be able to say—I ask not for faith, nor even a balanced mind; but doubt to the utmost, examine with the most rigorous scepticism; I stand upon the facts alone; I offer no explanation, or at least I make their truth dependent upon no explanation. They are or they are not. I will prove their existence, and I will defy you to disprove them.
It will not, we conceive, be denied, that one essential attribute of the social mind, a jealousy of credence in apparent anomalies, is a just and necessary guard upon human knowledge. If mere assertion were believed, every succeeding day would upset the knowledge of the preceding day; and however high the character of the assertor of new and abnormal facts may be, he must not expect them to be received upon the strength of his assertion. The best men may be deceived, and the best men may be led astray by enthusiasm. When the slightest discovery in physical science is published, it is immediately assailed by doubts from every quarter; and its promulgator, if he be accustomed to research and trained to scientific investigation, never complains of these doubts, because he knows the vast number of perplexing deceptions in which he has himself been entangled, and the caution with which he himself would receive a similar announcement.
It is vain to cite instances of truths unappreciated by the age in which they were advanced. We deprecate as much as any the persecution with which occasionally men who have seen far in advance of their age have been attacked; but the saying, "Malheureux celui qui est en avance de son siècle," is not always true: if the new truth be difficult of demonstration it will be proportionately tardy of reception, but if easy of proof it is very rapidly received. As an example of this we may instance the discovery of Volta. In the history of physical science, never was a more sudden leap taken than by this illustrious man—that a juxtaposition of matter in its least organic form should produce such surprising effects upon the human organism, was to the world, as it existed in the year 1800, a most marvellous phenomenon; and had the link in the finest chain of proof been wanting, men would have been justified in any degree of scepticism or incredulity. But it was easy of demonstration; any one with a dozen discs of iron and zinc, and the same number of penny-pieces, could satisfy himself; and the consequence was, the discovery was instantly admitted. Let mesmerists put the same power of self-satisfaction into the hands of the world, and doubt will be at once removed; if, as they say, their science is not of equal exactitude, they must bide their time and not complain.
Magnetism and electricity, moreover, often cited by Mr Townshend, and undoubtedly the most surprising additions to human knowledge within the historical period, though abnormal, are not contradictory to experience—they were an entirely new series of facts added to our previous store—they did not destroy or lessen the force of any previously received truths. Not so mesmerism, and therefore the more stringent should be, and is, the proof required.
Come we now to the second class of arguments adopted in favour of mesmerism, and by the same persons (Mr Townshend, for instance) as support the first. Mr Townshend says, (p. 29,) "to the mesmeriser the facts of mesmerism are no miracles;" and yet he avers that mesmerism can make the blind see and the deaf hear. (Pp. xxxii., and 178.) We cannot very clearly see his notion of a miracle. Passing over this, however, and taking him to assert what the first branch of his argument requires to be asserted, that there is no miracle, or that there is nothing but the contradiction of a necessary truth, such as that three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, which may not fall within some natural law of which we have not all the data—we cannot see why, in the second half of his book, he so sedulously endeavours to prove that mesmerism is consistent with experience, and may be supported upon similar grounds, and accounted for by similar theories, to those by which the agency of the imponderable forces is established and accounted for. After using every argument in his power to show the fallibility of experience, and the reasons why we should not disbelieve mesmerism because contradictory to it, which contradiction he admits in terms, the author writes a chapter, the title of which is, "Conformity of Mesmerism with General Experience."—(P. 155.) As instances of these reverse modes of viewing the subject, we quote the following passages—the one taken from the commencement of the book, where the first line of argument is adopted; the other from the latter portion, where the second is.
"Thus, then, till the initial step towards a comprehension of mesmerism be taken anew, there is no hope that it will ever be understood or appreciated. Why unavailingly seek to reduce it to a formula of which it is unsusceptible? If we ascribe it to a power already ascertained, why not treat it, at least, as an entirely new function of that power? Why limit it to what we know, when, possibly, it may be destined to extend the boundaries of our knowledge? Why are we to be trammelled with foregone conclusions? Yet upon these very restrictions the opponents of mesmerism insist; thus taking away from men the means of investigating the agency in question, by forcing them to set about it in the wrong way."—(P. 12.)
Having, then, thus expressed himself in the early part of the work, towards the close we find the following sentence. "Taking this simple view of sensation, (that objects should be brought into a certain relation with us by something intermediate,) we find nothing in mesmerism contradictory of nature. Under its influence, the human frame continues to be still a system of nerves acted upon by elastic media, for the purpose of conveying to us the primal impulse of the Almighty Mind, which made, sustains, and moves the universe—having, as I trust, shown the conformity of mesmerism in all essential points with the principles of nature, and the inferences of reason," &c. &c.
If we are to admit mesmerism as a series of facts apparently inconsistent with experience, it is most hasty and unphilosophical to attempt to generalize it by crude hypotheses. To rest its probable truth upon these hypotheses, is to take a totally different ground, and one much lower and more assailable. We have no desire to be hypercritical—to expose minor scientific inaccuracies in the work before us; but we do not hesitate to assert, that, independently of its inconsistency with the previous course of reasoning, the hypothesis or hypotheses of Mr Townshend are most unsatisfactory.
Heat, light, electricity, magnetism, are by some regarded as specific fluids; by others, as undulations of one or more specific fluid; and by a third class, as undulations or polarizations of ordinary matter. Thus, by the first, light would be viewed as a material emanation from the luminous body; by the second, as an undulation of an imponderable ether, existing between the luminous body and the recipient; and by the third, as an undulation of the air, glass, or other matter, placed between the luminous body and the object. The last would regard the ether in the planetary spaces, not as a specific imponderable fluid, but as a highly attenuated expansion of air, gas, or other matter, having all the functions of ordinary matter. Whewell has, indeed, published a demonstration that all matter is ponderable, and that imponderable matter is not a conceivable idea. Be this as it may, the diversity of opinion on this point shows the difficulty the mind finds in departing from the truths of phenomena to the uncertainties of hypothesis; but if hypothesis be justifiable, which it is only on the ground of absolute necessity to link together, and render conventionally intelligible, certain undoubted, undeniable facts, which have been associated together under the terms electricity, magnetism, &c.—how difficult and dangerous it must be when the facts which it seeks to associate are denied by the mass of thinking men, when they are confessed to be mysterious and irregular by their most strenuous advocates, each of whom differs, in many respects, as to these facts!