Ev. I remember, but believe it not.
Cast. And is it thus with all our legends? have you no more faith in your own order? There is the learned physician, Justin Kerner. You have not forgotten, Astrophel, his beautiful story of that most accomplished somnambule, the Prophetess of Prevorst, who seemed, as she said, to draw from the air a living principle, and whose very vitality, it was believed, was preserved by the magnetic influence. The body of this ethereal creature enfolded her spirit like a veil of film,—she was a very flower of light living on sun-beams. Her senses were lighted up by the minutest atom. A web of gossamer stung her waxen skin like a nettle. At the pale green light of a glow-worm, she fell into ecstatic sleep; and then, (as to my own Tasso,) came to her spectral visitants, with whom she conversed, and whose colourless forms were visible even to her earthly companions. This fair creature had, as the story goes, been some time dead, when her mother made passes over her cold face and lips; and lo! her eyes opened, and a tremor was on her lip. Were I Astrophel, methinks I would make a pilgrimage to Lowenstein, where her body lies. And now, Evelyn, if you will, reprove me for my wildness, but confess there must be a sort of truth in legends so circumstantial as these.
Ev. A fair question, dearest Castaly. Yes, it is the crude or false interpretation of that sort of truth, a transient glimpse it may be, of some embryo principle, that leads to popular error. A baseless theory is raised on an isolated fact; and infantile science, bursting from its leading-strings ere it can crawl, topples headlong down the precipice, and splits on the rock of hypothetical presumption.
And then the confusion into which the mind is thrown by the definitions and conclusions of magnetizers, would make a very Babel of the fair field of philosophy. The least perplexing, perhaps, is that of the French savans who referred magnetism to the efforts of a fluid matter consisting of fire, air, and spirit, to preserve its equilibrium in certain bodies which were, as to their capacity for this fluid, in a state of plus and minus. There is nothing very unphilosophical in this; for the essence of magnetism is somewhat analogous to eccentric derangement of mind, a disturbance of that order or symmetry among the faculties and actions, by which one is highly excited and another is comparatively passive. In a word, Mesmerism is true in part: it may induce catalepsy, somnambulism, exalted sensation, apathetic insensibility, suspended circulation, even death. Clairvoyance and prophecy alone are the impositions as regards its effects, as the “blue flame” at the finger tips is of its nature.
One folly more. Mesmer himself vaunted to Dr. Von Ellikon, “twenty years ago I magnetized the sun;” &c. so that the miracle of Joshua was but a stroke of magnetism. Indeed, Richter, rector of the School of Dessau, affirms that all the miracles of the Testament were but the sequences of magnetic passes. And Kieser refers all to a “telluric spirit,” a sort of magic, of which the sun and moon are the grand reservoirs; nay, this influence is the real cause of sleep and waking.
Ida. So that we are mesmerized by the moon at night-fall, and unmesmerized by the sun at the opening of the dawn.
Ev. Then there were some aphorisms of Wolfart about fiddling to the viscera with his magnetic medicine, and working them up, as it were, to a jig or a bolero. These are the visions of a madman. But surely the illusion regarding this mysterious fluid is confessed in Dupotet’s own notion of his own wondrous faculty, when he asserts his belief that animal magnetism is analogous to the royal touch, and the mysteries of Apollo, and Æsculapius, and Isis, the miracles of Vespasian, and the Sibylline prophecies.
Astr. You sneer at this as you did at the blue flame; but Dupotet assures us that while he is magnetizing his patients, he feels a sensation at the points of his fingers resembling the aura from diffused electricity. Now is it not fair to ask if electro-magnetism may not reside in the animal as well as in the mineral, in man as well as in the torpedo and gymnotus. And why may there not be a condition of intercommunication or en rapport, a magnetic aura creeping through the nerves of each body?
We should not, therefore, make any hasty decision against the presence of an aura streaming from the fingers and directed by the will. Monsieur Deleuze said, in Paris, “I do not know if this be material or spiritual, nor to what distance it is impelled; but it is impelled and directed by my will, for if I cease to will, the influence instantly ceases.”
I remember Priestly opined that phlogiston in our bodies produced electricity, which was destined for our own purposes merely. But as the silurus and the torpedo possess the power of imparting theirs, although at the expense of their animal power, I presume to think that concentrated mind may impart our own nervous influence to others.