All this is no more than might have occurred to a thoughtful historian
long years ago; but there is yet something else which it has been
reserved for our generation to perceive, or at least to declare, without
fear or hesitation. Mr. Upham may mean more than some people would in
what he says of the new opening made by science into the dark depths
of mystery covered by the term Witchcraft; for he is not only the
brother-in-law but the intimate friend and associate of Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard
University, and still better known to us, as he is at home, as the
writer of the physiological tales, "Elsie Venner" and the "Guardian
Angel," which have impressed the public as something new in the
literature of fiction. It can not be supposed that Mr. Upham's view of
the Salem Delusion would have been precisely what we find it here if
he and Dr. Holmes had never met; and, but for the presence of the
Professor's mind throughout the book, which is most fitly dedicated to
him, its readers might have perceived less clearly the true direction in
which to look for a solution of the mystery of the story, and its writer
might have written something less significant in the place of the
following paragraph:
"As showing how far the beliefs of the understanding, the perceptions of
the senses, and the delusions of the imagination may be confounded, the
subject belongs not only to theology and moral and political science,
but to _physiology_, in its original and proper use, as embracing our
whole nature; and the facts presented may help to conclusions relating
to what is justly regarded as the great mystery of our being--the
connection between the body and the mind." (Vol. i. p. viii.)