SOME PROGRESS.
Hitherto I had neither been magnetized myself nor magnetized others. I
had read the principal works which had been written in French and
English on the subject, and had witnessed and carefully analyzed the
experiments made by my friends; but now I madly resolved to make
experiments for myself.
A portion of the winter of 1841-2 I spent in Philadelphia, and as my
acquaintance was principally with the Hicksite Quakers, Unitarians,
Swedenborgians, Universalists, and open unbelievers in all religion, I
was, as a matter of course, thrown into the very circles where Animal
Magnetism, as well as all conceivable novelties and absurdities, were
the order of the day. My friends and associates were nearly all
philanthropists and world-reformers. There were among them seers and
seeresses, enthusiasts and fanatics, socialists and communists,
abolitionists and anti-hangmen, radicals and women’s-rights men of both
sexes; all professing the deepest and most disinterested love for
mankind, and claiming to be moved by the single desire to do good to the
race. All agreed that hitherto every thing had gone wrong; all agreed in
denouncing all forms of religion and government that had hitherto
obtained amongst men; all agreed in declaiming against the clergy of all
denominations, in manifesting their indignation against all political
and civil rule, and whatever tended in the least to restrain the
passions of individuals or the multitude, in asserting the wonderful
progress of the human race during the last hundred years, and in
predicting that a new era was about to dawn for the world; but beyond
this I could find scarcely a point on which any two of them were not at
loggerheads.
I cannot say that the differences I found among these excellent people
when it concerned their philanthropic projects or their various schemes
of world-reform, edified me much, but I was charmed with their
disinterestedness, with their zeal, and their superiority to the
restraints of popular prejudice, and what they stigmatized as
conventionalism. I was above all delighted to observe the new importance
assumed in behalf of woman; and it was a real pleasure to hear a
charming young lady, whose face a painter might have chosen for his
model, in a sweet musical voice, and a gentle and loving look, which
made you all unconsciously take her hand in yours, defend our great
grandmother Eve, and maintain that her act, which an ungrateful world
had held to have been the source of all the vice, the crime, the sin and
misery of mankind, was an act of lofty heroism, of noble daring, of pure
disinterested love for man. Adam, but for her, would have tamely
submitted to the tyrannical order he had received, and the race would
never have known how to distinguish between good and evil. How, with the
sweet young lady—I see and hear her now—sitting on a stool near me,
laying her hand in the fervor of her argument on mine, and looking up
with all the witchery of her eyes into my face, how could I fail to be
convinced that man is cold, calculating, selfish, and cowardly, and that
the world cannot be reformed without the destruction of the male (it
might be called the _mal_) organization of society, the elevation of
woman to her proper sphere, and the infusion into the government and
management of public and private affairs, some portion of the love, the
daring, the enthusiasm, and disinterestedness of woman’s heart? There
was nothing to be said in reply.
But alas! unhappy Saint Simonians; you believed also that the evils
endured by the race were owing, in great measure, to the fact that
society had hitherto been organized and governed by men as distinguished
from women, and therefore without the female element. You would in your
reorganization of the world, avoid this sad mistake. You could not agree
on the definitive organization of mankind till you had obtained the
voice of woman. But how obtain that from woman, the slave of the old
male organization? A _Père suprême_ you had found, but a woman to sit by
his side as _Mère suprême_, and to exercise with him equal authority,
you found not, and could proceed no further. You selected twelve
apostles, and sent them forth in search of a _Mère suprême_. They
searched France, England, Germany, Italy, all Europe, even to the harem
of the Grand Turk, but they found her not, and returned and reported
their ill-success. Then fear and consternation seized you; then fell
despair took possession of your souls; then you saw all your hopes
blasted, and you separated and dissolved in thin air. Perhaps, if you
had sent your apostles to the United States, to Philadelphia or Boston,
you might have succeeded, and Père Enfantin not have vanished from
Paris, the capital of the world, to waste himself as an engineer in the
service of Mehemet Ali.
It was a real pleasure to find these men of advanced views, and these
women of burning hearts and strong minds, who had outgrown the narrow
prejudices of their sex, all substituting the love of mankind for the
love of God. They all agreed that philanthropy was the highest virtue,
and the only virtue. Charity was an obsolete virtue, no longer in use,
and not suited to our advanced stage of human progress. That taught us
to love man in God, but we have learned to love God in man; that is, man
himself, without any reference to God. This was charming, and
emancipated us from our thraldom to priests, and all old-fashioned
religion. What was better still, I found that even this noble
philanthropy received a very liberal interpretation, and did not
interfere at all with those pleasant passions and vices, called anger,
spite, envy, &c. It was only a love of man in the abstract, the love of
mankind in general, which permitted the most sublime hatred or
indifference to all men in particular. Wonderful nineteenth century! I
exclaimed; wonderful seers and seeresses, and most delightful moralists
are these modern world-reformers!
In this pleasant and delightful circle mesmerism attracted its full
share of attention. I met it in almost every circle where I happened to
be present. It seemed to take the place of cards, music, and dancing.
One evening I was at a friend’s house, where were collected some
twenty-five or thirty gentlemen and ladies, or perhaps I should say,
ladies and gentlemen, mainly on my account, for I was, in a small way,
something of a lion, and our people are great in lionizing whenever they
have an opportunity, as Dickens, Kossuth, Padre Gavazzi, and others
hardly less worthy can abundantly testify. Indeed, our people are
democrats only from envy and spite. In their souls they are the most
aristocratic people in the world, and would be so avowedly, only they
have no legitimate aristocracy. Democracy has its origin in the
feeling,—since I am as good as you, and since I cannot be an aristocrat,
you shall be a democrat with me.
In this private party there were two or three somnambulists, and twice
that number of mesmerizers. My friend, Mr. Winslow, from Boston, was
present, and also Mr. Cotton, who was in the city on some business
pertaining to holding a world’s convention in London for evangelizing
France, Italy, and other benighted countries of Europe. Mr. Winslow was
in high spirits. He was sure that he was making out his proofs that
there is a demonic element in human nature, never once reflecting, that
if demonic it is not human.
“I am,” said he, “on the point of rehabilitating history. Miracles,
divinations, sorceries, magic, the black arts, which surprise us in all
history, sacred and profane, and which are either denied outright, or
ascribed to supernatural agencies, I think I shall be able to accept, as
facts, as real phenomena, and explain on natural principles. I think I
have in mesmerism an explanation of them all.”
“So you imagine that with mesmerism you may take your place with the
magicians of Egypt, and enter into a successful contest with Moses,”
said Mr. Cotton. “You forget that those magicians were discomfited, and
at the third trial were obliged to give up and acknowledge themselves
beaten. ‘The finger of God is here.’”
“Moses was a superior mesmerizer, and he mesmerized for a good, and they
for a bad purpose, which makes all the difference in the world,” replied
Mr. Winslow.
“But these magicians, then, could exercise the mesmeric power up to a
certain point, and for evil; I thought it was a doctrine of mesmerizers,
that none but virtuous and honest men could mesmerize, and these only
for a good and honest purpose,” said Mr. Cotton.
“I am not,” said I, “particularly interested in explaining what the
Germans call the Night-Side of nature, or the marvellous deeds recorded
in sacred and profane history; I would be able to do those deeds,
reproduce those wonderful phenomena, and exert myself a power over the
primordial elements or primitive forces of nature, be they spirits, be
they what they will. I am tired of being pent up within this narrow
cage, and of being the slave of every external influence. I would master
nature; ride upon the whirlwind and direct the storm. There may, for
aught I know, be an element of truth in the marvellous machinery of the
Arabian Nights Entertainments, and something more than the extravagances
of an Oriental imagination in those tales of magic, of good and evil
Genii. What, if the tale of Aladdin’s Lamp were true? Who dare say that
the river and ocean gods, the Naiads, the Dryads, Hamadryads, Pan and
his reed, Apollo and his lyre, Mercury and his wand, the supernal and
infernal gods of classic poetry, were all mere creatures of the poetic
imagination? Perhaps even the _diablerie_ of modern German romance, of
Hoffman, Baron de Fouquè, and others, has more of reality than most
readers suspect.”
“All the gods of the Gentiles were devils,” replied Mr. Cotton, “and to
a considerable extent I concede the reality you intimate. There are good
angels and bad, and both have intercourse with mankind. The air swarms
with evil spirits, with devils, fallen angels, endowed with a more than
human intelligence, and a more than human power. These are under a chief
called Lucifer, Beelzebub, Satan, who seeks to seduce men from their
allegiance to God, to make them receive him for their master, to put him
in the place of God, and to pay him divine honors. It was this fallen
angel, the prince of this world as St. Paul calls him, and the prince of
the powers of the air, who everywhere and unceasingly besieges the
Christian, and against whom we have to be constantly on the guard, that
the ancient Gentiles literally worshipped as God, and it is these evil
spirits, these powers of the air, that swarm around us, and infest all
nature, that ancient classic poetry celebrates, and that your modern
philosophers would persuade us were mere poetic fancies.”
“The powers or forces themselves, I concede,” said Mr. Winslow, “but I
do not recognize their personality, nor their superhuman character.”
“Perhaps,” said I, “Mr. Winslow is a little too hasty in supposing them
to be the innate power or force of human nature. This power exerted by
the mesmerizer may well be natural and yet not be human. It may be one
of the mighty forces of universal nature, which the mesmerizer has the
secret of using or bringing to bear in the accomplishment of his own
purposes. In mesmerism, perhaps, we may find the key to the mysteries of
nature, and the secret of rendering practically available all the great
and mighty powers at work in nature’s laboratory, so that a man may
learn to strengthen himself with all the force of the entire universe.”
“The power you speak of,” said Mr. Wilson, an ex-Unitarian parson, and
who passed for a Transcendentalist, “I believe to be very real. We
sometimes ascribe it to the will, and it is true that under certain
relations the will has great energy, and is well nigh invincible. Yet it
is not, I apprehend, so much the energy of the will itself as of faith,
which brings the will into harmony with the primordial laws of the
universe, and strengthens it by all the forces of nature. ‘If ye had
faith as a grain of mustard seed,’ said Jesus, ‘ye could say to this
mountain, be removed and planted in yonder sea, and it should obey you.’
I am far from being able to prescribe the limits of full, undoubting,
and unwavering faith. Faith is thaumaturgic, always a miracle-worker,
and if we could only undertake with a calm and full confidence of
success, I have little doubt but the meanest of us might work greater
miracles than any recorded in history. ‘If ye believe, ye shall do
greater works than these.’”
“There is more in this power of faith than received philosophy has
fathomed. By it one’s eyes are opened, and he seems to penetrate the
profoundest mysteries of the universe, even to the essence of the
Godhead. We may mark it in all our undertakings. Whatever we attempt,
nothing doubting, we are almost sure to accomplish. Let me, as a public
speaker, desire to produce a certain effect, and let me have full
confidence that I shall succeed, and I am sure not to fail. Let me utter
a sentiment, with my whole soul absorbed in it, confident that it is
going right to the hearts of my hearers, and it goes there. Whenever I
am conscious in what I am saying, of this calm, undoubting faith, I am
sure of my audience. I no sooner open my lips than I have them under my
control, and I can do with them as I please. When I have felt this faith
in what I was about to utter, I have felt before uttering it, its effect
upon the assembly, and my whole frame has been sensible of something
like an electric shock, and it seemed that my audience and I were
connected by a magnetic chain. In conversing with a friend, in whom I
have full faith, and to whom I can speak with full confidence, I have
felt the same. Our souls seem to be melted into one, to move with one
and the same will, and each to be exalted and strengthened by the
combined power of both. Then rise we into the upper regions of truth,
far above the unaided flight of either. Heaven opens to us, and we
behold the hidden things of God. Something the same is felt also when
one goes forth in love with nature, and yields to her gentle and
hallowing influences. We inhale power with her fragrant odors, become
conscious of purer, loftier and holier thoughts and feelings, and form
stronger and nobler resolutions.”
“All that,” said Mr. Cotton, “is common enough, but it is easily
explained by sympathy and imagination.”
“But,” Mr. Wilson replied, “what, then, is the power of sympathy or
imagination? That is a question I cannot answer. I yield to the power,
enjoy it, and question it not. Begin to question it, and it is gone. I
know well that philosophers call the power I speak of under one aspect,
love, under another, sympathy, under another, imagination, under still
another, faith, but what it is in itself they cannot tell me. Be it what
it will, it is demonic, supernatural, an element in human nature, of
which men in all ages have had glimpses, but of which none of us have as
yet had any thing more. The history of our race everywhere bristles with
prodigies. These prodigies were once regarded as miracles, and supposed
to be wrought by the finger of God; now an unbelieving age treats them
as impostures, cheats, fabrications, proving only people’s love of the
marvellous, their natural proneness to superstition, and the ease with
which they can be gulled by the crafty and the designing. I believe
them, for the most part, real. I believe that there are times when man
has a power over the elements, and can make the spirits obey him. Who
knows but the time may come, perhaps is now near, when the law by which
this power operates will be discovered, and this power, which has
hitherto been irregular and transient in its manifestations, will became
common and regular, and therefore bear the marks of a fixed and
permanent law of nature?
“But, call it what you will, it is not identical with the human will,
nor in my opinion is it, strictly speaking, a property of human nature.
It is an overshadowing, an all-pervading power, identical, most likely,
with that Power which creates and manifests itself in the universe. We
can avail ourselves of it, not because it is ours, but by placing
ourselves in harmony with it, within its focal range, and suffering its
rays to be all concentred in us.”
“That is substantially my own view,” remarked Mr. Winslow, “and I regard
mesmerism as revealing the regular and permanent means by which we can
avail ourselves of that creative and miracle-working power. I do not
pretend that man is thaumaturgic in himself, as distinguished from the
Being from whom his life emanates, but by virtue of his union with the
Fountain of All Force.”
“I think,” said Mr. Sowerby, an ex-Methodist elder, “that by magnetism,
we shall be able to explain the operations of the Holy Ghost, and the
mysteries of regeneration.”
“More likely,” interrupted Mr. Cotton, “the operations of Satan, and the
Mystery of Iniquity.”
“Yes, but in a sense thou dost not mean,” interposed Obediah Mott, a
Hicksite Quaker. “Thou knowest how difficult it is for thee to explain
the Popish miracles, many of which thou knowest come exceedingly well
attested. Mesmerism will show thee, that they were wrought by mesmeric
influences.”
“But I have no wish to explain Popish miracles on a principle that would
take from Christian miracles all their value. I hate popery, but I love
the Gospel more.”
The conversation was continued for some time, in the small circle around
me. In another part of the room they had got a somnambulist, and were
making various experiments. When the larger part of the company had
dispersed, I requested Mr. Winslow to try if he could not mesmerize me.
He did not think he should succeed. He thought I had not the sort of
temperament to be magnetized; that I had too strong a will, too robust a
constitution, and quite too vigorous health. It would at any rate
require far more mesmeric power than he had to subdue me. However, he
would try, and do what he could.
I seated myself in an arm chair, with my feet to the south, and Mr.
Winslow began with his passes. The first ten minutes he produced not the
slightest effect, for I resisted him by the whole force of my will. At
length I closed my eyes, and resigned myself to his influence. I now
became aware of his passes, though they were made without actually
touching me. It seemed as if slight electric sparks were emitted from
the tips of his fingers, producing a slight, but agreeable, and as it
were a cooling sensation. I felt slight spasmodic affections at the pit
of my stomach, which gradually became violent. My arms made involuntary
motions, and my legs and feet felt light and flew up as he extended his
passes over them. I had not the least inclination to sleep, but found
that he was actually exerting an influence over my body greater than at
all pleased me. I tried, and found that I could arrest his influence if
I willed, and that he had power over me only so long as I offered no
voluntary opposition. I alternately yielded and resisted, and found that
he had no power to overcome my own will. He operated for about an hour,
with no other effects than those I have mentioned, and gave up the task
of putting me to sleep as hopeless. The most remarkable thing about it,
that I recollect, though it did not much strike me at the time, was,
that although my eyes were closed, I saw or seemed to see distinctly,
slight luminous appearances at the ends of his fingers as he made his
passes. These luminous appearances were in rapid motion, and seemed of a
bluish tinge edged with yellowish white.
There was nothing in the experiment that could establish the reality of
the mesmeric influence to bystanders, but there was enough to satisfy me
that it was neither jugglery nor imagination. I could easily see from
the experiment, that upon persons differently constituted from myself,
less accustomed to self-control, and to the quiet analysis of their own
feelings, much greater and more striking effect must have been produced.
I never submitted myself to an experiment of the sort again. I found
that in my own case it was quite unnecessary, and that I could do all
that the mesmerized could without being thrown into the somnambulic
state. I commenced from that time to practise mesmerism myself. I
entered upon a course of experiments which carried me much farther than
the masters I was acquainted with. I found, that while no machinery for
magnetizing was absolutely indispensable, yet passes with the hand were
serviceable, and that the tub and rod of Mesmer, which had been
discarded, were of great assistance. Metallic balls, properly prepared,
and magnetized, and placed in the hand of the person to be affected, as
practised by the Electro-Biologists, very much facilitated the process.
I was thus brought back to Mesmer, and induced to reject the doctrine of
the ultra-spiritualists, who would have it that the effects are produced
by the simple will acting on the will of the person to be mesmerized.
There was certainly a fluid in the case, whether electric, magnetic, or
as the Baron Riechenbach would say, _odic_, and whether it is to be
regarded as efficient cause or only as an instrument, as maintained by a
recent French author, who seems to have studied the whole subject with
rare patience, and yet rarer good sense.