expedient to add a historical chapter to their excellent work. The
immense erudition of Bailly would have given it an inestimable value. I
figure to myself, also, that in seeing the Mesmeric practices that have
now been in use during upwards of two thousand years, the public would
have asked itself whether so long an interval of time had ever been
required to push a good and useful thing forward into estimation. By
circumscribing himself to this point of view, a few traits would have
sufficed.
Plutarch, for example, would have come to the aid of the reporter. He
would have showed him Pyrrhus curing complaints of the spleen, by means
of frictions made with the great toe of his right foot. Without giving
one's self up to a wild spirit of interpretation, we might be permitted
to see in that fact the germ of animal magnetism. I admit that one
circumstance would have rather unsettled the savant: this was the white
cock that the King of Macedon sacrificed to the gods before beginning
these frictions.
Vespasian, in his turn, might have figured among the predecessors of
Mesmer, in consequence of the extraordinary cures that he effected in
Egypt by the action of his foot. It is true that the pretended cure of
an old blindness, only by the aid of a little of that emperor's saliva,
would have thrown some doubt on the veracity of Suetonius.
Homer and Achilles are not too far back but we might have invoked their
names. Joachim Camerarius, indeed, asserted having seen, on a very
ancient copy of the Iliad, some verses that the copyists sacrificed
because they did not understand them, and in which the poet alluded, not
to the heel of Achilles (its celebrity has been well established these
three thousand years,) but to the medical properties possessed by the
great toe of that same hero's right foot.
What I regret most is, the chapter in which Bailly might have related
how certain adepts of Mesmer's had the hardihood to magnetize the moon,
so as, on a given day, to make all the astronomers devoted to observing
that body fall into a syncope; a perturbation, by the way, that no
geometer, from Newton to Laplace, had thought of.
The work of Bailly gave rise to trouble, spite, and anger, among the
Mesmerists. It was for many months the target for their combined
attacks. All the provinces of France saw refutations of the celebrated
report arise: sometimes under the form of calm discussions, decent and
moderate; but generally with all the characteristics of violence, and
the acrimony of a pamphlet.
It would be labour thrown away now to go to the dusty shelves of some
special library, to hunt up hundreds of pamphlets, even the titles of
which are now completely forgotten. The impartial analysis of that
ardent controversy does not call for such labour; I believe at least
that I shall attain my aim, by concentrating my attention on two or
three writings which, by the strength of the arguments, the merit of the
style, or the reputation of their authors, have left some trace in men's
minds.
In the first rank of this category of works we must place the elegant
pamphlet published by Servan, under the title of _Doubts of a
Provincial, proposed to the Gentlemen Medical Commissioners commanded by
the King to examine into Animal Magnetism_.
The appearance of this little work of Servan's was saluted in the camp
of the Mesmerists with cries of triumph and joy. Undecided minds fell
back into doubt and perplexity. Grimm wrote in Nov. 1784: "No cause is
desperate. That of magnetism seemed as if it must fall under the
reiterated attacks of medicine, of philosophy, of experience and of good
sense.... Well, M. Servan, formerly the Attorney-General at Grenoble,
has been proving that with talent we may recover from any thing, even
from ridicule."
Servan's pamphlet seemed at the time the anchor of salvation for the
Mesmerists. The adepts still borrow from it their principal arguments.
Let us see, then, whether it has really shaken Bailly's report.
From the very commencing lines, the celebrated Attorney-General puts the
question in terms deficient in exactness. If we believe him, the
commissioners were called to establish a parallel between magnetism and
medicine; "they were to weigh on both sides the errors and the dangers;
to indicate with wise discernment what it would be desirable to
preserve, and what to retrench, in the two sciences." Thus, according to
Servan, the sanative art altogether would have been questioned, and the
impartiality of the physicians might appear suspicious. The clever
magistrate took care not to forget, on such an occasion, the eternal
maxim, no one can be both judge and client. Physicians, then, ought to
have been excepted.
There then follows a legitimate homage to the non-graduated
academicians, members of the commission: "Before Franklin and Bailly,"
says the author, "every knee must bend. The one has invented much, the
other has discovered much; Franklin belongs to the two worlds, and all
ages seem to belong to Bailly." But arming himself afterwards with more
cleverness than uprightness, with these words of the reporter, "The
commissioners, especially the doctors, made an infinity of experiments,"
he insinuates under every form that the commissioners accepted of a very
passive line of conduct. Thus, putting aside the most positive
declarations, pretending even to forget the name, the titles of the
reporter, Servan no longer sees before him but one class of adversaries,
regent doctors of the Faculty of Paris, and then he gives full scope to
his satirical vein. He holds it even as an honour that they do not
regard him as impartial. "The doctors have killed me; what it has
pleased them to leave me of life is not worth, in truth, my seeking a
milder term.... For these twenty years I have always been worse through
the remedies administered to me than through my maladies.... Even were
animal magnetism a chimera, it should be tolerated; it would still be
useful to mankind, by saving many individuals among them from the
incontestable dangers of vulgar medicine.... I wish that medicine, so
long accustomed to deceive itself, should still deceive itself now, and
that the famous report be nothing but a great error...." Amidst these
singular declarations, there are hundreds of epigrams still more
remarkable by their ingenious and lively turn than by their novelty. If
it were true, Gentlemen, that the medical corps had ever tried,
knowingly, to impose on the vulgar, to hide the uncertainty of their
knowledge, the weakness of their theories, the vagueness of their
conceptions, under an obscure and pedantic jargon, the immortal and
laughable sarcasms of Molière would not have been more than an act of
strict justice. In all cases every thing has its day; now, towards the
end of the eighteenth century, the most delicate, the most thorny points
of doctrine were discussed with an entire good faith, with perfect
lucidity, and in a style that placed many members of the faculty in the
rank Of our best speakers. Servan, however, goes beyond the limits of a
scientific discussion, when, without any sort of excuse, he accuses his
adversaries of being anti-mesmerists through esprit de corps, and, what
is worse, through cupidity.
Servan is more in his element when he points out that the present best
established medical theories occasioned at their birth prolonged
debates; when he reminds us that several medicines have been alternately
proscribed and recommended with vehemence: the author might even have
more deeply undermined this side of his subject. Instead of some
unmeaning jokes, why did he not show us, for example, in a neighbouring
country, two celebrated physicians, Mead and Woodward, deciding, sword
in hand, the quarrel that had arisen between them as to the purgative
treatment of a patient? We should then have heard Woodward, pierced
through and through, rolling on the ground, and drenched in blood, say
to his adversary with an exhausted voice: "The blow was harsh, but yet I
prefer it to your medicine!"
It is not truth alone that has the privilege of rendering men
passionate. Such was the legitimate result of these retrospective views.
I now ask myself whether, by labouring to put the truth of this aphorism
in full light, the passionate advocate of Mesmerism showed proof of
ability!
Gentlemen, let us put all these personal attacks aside, all these
recriminations against science and its agents, who unfortunately had not
succeeded in restoring the health of the morose magistrate. What remains
then of his pamphlet? Two chapters, only two chapters, in which Bailly's
report is treated seriously. The medical commissioners and the members
of the Academy had not seen, in the real effects of Mesmerism anything
more than was occasioned by imagination. The celebrated magistrate
exclaims on this subject, "Any one hearing this proposition spoken of
would suppose, before reading the report, that the commissioners had
treated and cured, or considerably relieved by the force of imagination,
large tumours, inveterate obstructions, gutta serenas, and strong
paralyses." Servan admitted, in short, that magnetism had effected most
wonderful cures. But there lay all the question. The cures being
admitted, the rest followed as a matter of course.
However incredible these cures might be, they must be admitted, they
said, when numerous witnesses certified their truth. Was it owing to
chance that attestations were wanting for the miracles at the Cemetery
of St. Médard? Did not the counsellor to the parliament, Montgeron,
state, in three large quarto volumes, the names of a great multitude of
individuals who protested on their honour as illuminati, that the tomb
of the Deacon, Páris, had restored sight to the blind, hearing to the
deaf, strength to the paralytic; that in a twinkling it cured ailing
people of gouty rheumatism, of dropsy, of epilepsy, of phthisis, of
abscesses, of ulcers, &c.? Did these attestations, although many
emanated from persons of distinction, from the Chevalier Folard, for
example, prevent the convulsionists from becoming the laughingstock of
Europe? Did they not see the Duchess of Maine herself laugh at their
prowess in the following witty couplet?--
"A scavenger at the palace-gate
Who, his left heel being lame,
Obtained as a most special grace,
That his right should ail the same."[9]
Was not government, urged to the utmost, at last obliged to interfere,
when the multitude, carrying folly to the extremest bounds, was going to
try to resuscitate the dead? In short, do we not remember the amusing
distich, affixed at the time to the gate of the Cemetery of St.
Médard?--
"By royal decree, we prohibit the gods
To work any miracles near to these sods."[10]
Servan must have known better than any one that in regard to testimony,
and in questions of complex facts, quality always carries the day over
mere numbers; let us add, that quality does not result either from
titles of nobility, or from riches, nor from the social position, nor
even from a certain sort of celebrity. What we must seek for in a
witness is a calmness of mind and of feeling, a store of knowledge, and
a very rare thing, notwithstanding the name it bears, common sense; on
the other hand, what we must most avoid is the innate taste of some
persons for the extraordinary, the wonderful, the paradoxical. Servan
did not at all recollect these precepts in the criticism he wrote on
Bailly's work.
We have already remarked that the Commissioners of the Academy and of
the Faculty did not assert that the Mesmeric meetings were always
ineffectual. They only saw in the crises the mere results of
imagination; nor did any sort of magnetic fluid reveal itself to their
eyes. I will also prove, that imagination alone generated the refutation
that Servan gave to Bailly's theory. "You deny," exclaims the
attorney-general, "you deny, gentlemen commissioners, the existence of
the fluid which Mesmer has made to act such an important part! I
maintain, on the contrary, not only that this fluid exists, but also
that it is the medium by the aid of which all the vital functions are
excited; I assert that imagination is one of the phenomena engendered by
this agent; that its greater or less abundance in this or that among our
organs, may totally change the normal intellectual state of
individuals."
Everybody agrees that too great a flow of blood towards the brain
produces a stupefaction of the mind. Analogous or inverse effects might
evidently be produced by a subtle, invisible, imponderable fluid, by a
sort of nervous fluid, or magnetic fluid (if this term be preferred),
circulating through our organs. And the commissioners took good care not
to speak on this subject of impossibility. Their thesis was more modest;
they contented themselves with saying that nothing demonstrated the
existence of such a fluid. Imagination, therefore, had no share in their
report; but in Servan's refutation, on the contrary, imagination was the
chief actor.
One thing that was still less proved, if possible, than any of those
that we have been speaking of, is the influence that the magnetic fluid
of the magnetizer might exert on the magnetized person.
In magnetism, properly so called, in that which physicists have studied
with so much care and success, the phenomena are constant. They are
reproduced exactly under the same conditions of form, of duration, and
of quantity, when certain bodies, being present to each other, find
themselves exactly in the same relative positions. That is the essential
and necessary character of all purely material and mechanical action.
Was it thus in the pretended phenomena of animal magnetism? In no way.
To-day the crises would occur in the space of some seconds; to-morrow
they may require several entire hours; and finally, on another day,
other circumstances remaining the same, the effect would be positively
null. A certain magnetizer exercised a brisk action on a certain
patient, and was absolutely powerless on another who, on the contrary,
entered into a crisis under the earliest efforts of a second magnetizer.
Instead of one or two universal fluids, there must, then, to explain the
phenomena, be as many distinct fluids, and constantly acting, as there
exist animated or inanimate beings in the world.
The necessity of such a hypothesis evidently upset Mesmerism from its
very foundations; yet the illuminati did not judge thus. All bodies
became a focus of special emanations, more or less subtle, more or less
abundant, and more or less dissimilar. So far the hypothesis found very
few contradictors, even among rigorous minds; but soon these individual
corporeal emanations were endowed, relatively towards those, (without
the least appearance of proof,) either with a great power of
assimilation, or with a decided antagonism, or with a complete
neutrality; but they pretended to see in these occult qualities the
material causes of the most mysterious affections of the soul. Oh! then
doubt had a legitimate right to take possession of all those minds that
had been taught by the strict proceedings of science not to rest
satisfied with vain words. In the singular system that I have been
explaining, when Corneille says,--
"There are some secret knots, some sympathies,
By whose relations sweet assorted souls
Attach themselves the one to the other...."[11]
and when the celebrated Spanish Jesuit Balthazar Gracian spoke of the
natural relationship of minds and hearts, both the one and the other
alluded, assuredly without suspecting it, to the mixture, penetration,
and easy crossing of two atmospheres.
"I love thee not, Sabidus," wrote Martial, "and I know not why; all that
I can tell thee is, that I love thee not." Mesmerists would soon have
relieved the poet from his doubts. If Martial loved not Sabidus, it was
because their atmospheres could not intermingle without occasioning a
kind of storm.
Plutarch informs us that the conqueror of Arminius fainted at the sight
of a cock. Antiquity was astonished at this phenomenon. What could be
more simple, however? the corporeal emanations of Germanicus and of the
cock exercised a repulsive action the one on the other.
The illustrious biographer of Cheronea declares, it is true, that the
presence of the cock was not requisite, that its crowing produced
exactly the same effect on the adopted son of Tiberius. Now, the crowing
may be heard a long way off; the crowing, then, would seem to possess
the power of transporting the corporeal emanations of the king of the
lower court with great rapidity through space. The thing may appear
difficult to believe. As for myself, I think it would be puerile to stop
at such a difficulty; have we not leaped high over other difficulties
far more embarrassing?
The Maréchal d'Albret was still worse off than Germanicus: the
atmosphere that made him fall into a syncope exhaled from the head of a
wild boar. A live, complete, whole wild boar produced no effect; but on
perceiving the head of the animal detached from the body, the Maréchal
was struck as if with lightning. You see, gentlemen, to what sad trials
military men would be exposed, if the Mesmerian theory of atmospheric
conflicts were to regain favour. We ought to be carefully on our guard
against a ruse de guerre, of which no one till then had ever
thought,--that is, against cocks, wild boars, &c.,--for through them an
army might suddenly be deprived of its commander-in-chief. "It would
also be requisite not to entrust command," Montaigne says, "to men who
would fly from apples more than from arquebusades."
It is not only amongst the corpuscular emanations of living animals that
the Mesmerists asserted conflicts to occur. They unhesitatingly extended
their speculations to dead bodies. Some ancients dreamt that a catgut
cord made of a wolf's intestines would never strike in unison with one
made from a lamb's intestine; a discord of atmospheres renders the
phenomenon possible. It is still a conflict of corporeal emanations that
explains the other aphorism of an ancient philosopher: "The sound of a
drum made with a wolf's skin takes away all sonorousness from a drum
made with a lamb's skin."
Here I pause, Gentlemen. Montesquieu said: "When God created the brains
of human beings, he did not intend to guarantee them."
To conclude: Servan's witty, piquant, agreeably written pamphlet was
worthy under this triple claim of the reception with which the public
honoured it; but it did not shake, in any one part, the lucid, majestic,
elegant report by Bailly. The magistrate of Grénoble has said, that in
his long experience he had met men accustomed to reflect without
laughing, and other men who only wished to laugh without reflecting.
Bailly thought of the first class when he wrote his memorable report.
_The Doubts of the Provincial man_ were destined only for the other
class.
It was also to these light and laughing souls that Servan exclusively
addressed himself some time after, if it be true that the _Queries of
the young Doctor Rhubarbini de Purgandis_ were written by him.
Rhubarbini de Purgandis sets to work manfully. In his opinion the report
by Franklin, by Lavoisier, by Bailly, is, in the scientific life of
those learned men, what the _Monades_ were for Leibnitz, the
_Whirlwinds_ for Descartes, the _Commentary on the Apocalypse_ for
Newton. These examples may enable us to judge of the rest, and render
all farther refutation unnecessary.
Bailly's report destroyed root and branch the ideas, the systems, the
practices of Mesmer and of his adepts. Let us add sincerely that we have
no right to appeal to him in regard to modern somnambulism. The greater
portion of the phenomena now grouped around that name were neither known
nor announced in 1783. A magnetizer certainly says the most improbable
thing in the world, when he affirms that a given individual in the state
of somnambulism can see every thing in the most profound darkness, that
he can read through a wall, and even without the help of his eyes. But
the improbability of these announcements does not result from the
celebrated report, for Bailly does not mention such marvels, neither in
praise nor dispraise; he does not say one word about them. The
physicist, the doctor, the merely curious man who gives himself up to
experiments in somnambulism, who thinks he must examine whether, in
certain states of nervous excitement, some individuals are really
endowed with extraordinary faculties; with the faculty, for example, of
reading with their stomach, or with their heel; people who wish to know
exactly up to what point the phenomena so boldly asserted by the
magnetizers of our epoch may be within the domain of rogues and sharks;
all such people, we say, do not at all deny the authority of the subject
in question, nor do they put themselves really in opposition to the
Lavoisiers, the Franklins, or the Baillys; they dive into an entirely
new world, of which those illustrious learned men did not even suspect
the existence.
I cannot approve of the mystery adopted by some grave learned men, who,
in the present day, attend experiments on somnambulism. Doubt is a proof
of diffidence, and has rarely been inimical to the progress of science.
We could not say the same of incredulity. He who, except in pure
mathematics, pronounces the word _impossible_, is deficient in prudence.
Reserve is especially requisite when we treat of animal organization.
Our senses, notwithstanding twenty-four centuries of study,
observations, and researches, are far from being an exhausted subject.
Take, for example, the ear. A celebrated natural philosopher, Wollaston,
occupied himself with it; and immediately we learn, that with an equal
sensibility as regards the low notes a certain individual can hear the
highest tones, whilst another cannot hear them at all; and it becomes
proved that certain men, with perfectly sound organs, never heard the
cricket in the chimney-corner, yet did not doubt but that bats
occasionally utter a piercing cry; and attention being once awakened to
these singular results, observers have found the most extraordinary
differences of sensibility between their right ear and their left ear,
&c.
Our vision offers phenomena not less curious, and an infinitely vaster
field of research. Experience has proved, for example, that some people
are absolutely blind to certain colours, as red, and enjoy perfect
vision relatively to yellow, to green, and to blue. If the Newtonian
theory of emission be true, we must irrevocably admit that a ray ceases
to be light as soon as we diminish its velocity by one ten thousandth
part. Thence flow those natural conjectures, which are well worthy of
experimental examination: all men do not see by the same rays; decided
differences may exist in this respect in the same individual during
various nervous states; it is possible that the calorific rays, the dark
rays of one person, may be the luminous rays of another person, and
reciprocally; the calorific rays traverse some substances freely, which
are therefore called diathermal, these substances, thus far, had been
called opaque, because they transmit no ray commonly called luminous;
now the words opaque and diathermal have no absolute meaning. The
diathermals allow those rays to pass through which constitute the light
of one man; and they stop those which constitute the light of another
man. Perhaps in this way the key of many phenomena might be found, that
till now have remained without any plausible explanation.