18 SEPTEMBER 1909, Page 21

MESMERISM AND CHRISTIAN SCIENCE.* Ma. PODMOILE has the right degree

of scepticism (not that kind of scepticism, however, which is commonly exalted into a prejudice) for examining a subject of this sort. In stating the theories held at first in England about what used to be called " animal magnetism," be sums them up in three words : "fluid or fraud." That is to say, the extremists on one side believed in the emanation of a radiating magnetic force from the body of the mesmerist, and the extremists on the other side believed that the whole thing was a trick ; there was no intermediate view. To a considerable extent it is still true that no intermediate view is taken of all the practices, mysticisms, or scientific theories which are directly derived from Mesmer's teaching. The mystics have assumed so much that ordinary credulity has been overtaxed, and the medical profession, which could easily have guided the unscientific world, has looked nervously to its reputation, and has shrunk from being " mixed up in the matter" at all. Mr. Podmore offers in this book what seems to us to be an admirably sane middle view. He is prepared to examine every claim —he dismisses nothing with petulant prejudice—yet he accepts nothing which, let us say, would not be admitted as evidence in a Court of Law.. Mental, therapeutics are a diverse and rather bewildering study which is apt to get quite out of hand when treated by a loose thinker or untrained enthusiast. It is not the least merit of Podmore's excellent book that he has pruned his material into perfectly manageable proportions—many familiar names in the history of hypnotism are not even mentioned—and yet has left nothing essential unsaid. The power of the mind over the body and the reality of what is called " suggestion " are very important matters. With the implicit sanction of their doctors, most people agree to be shy of the whole subject, and this tendency has been lately emphasised by the injurious excesses of Christian Science. We cannot name any work which is more likely to set the public right than this book by Mr. Podmore. He accepts the minimum of what is likely to be true, and in the circum- stances that is an advantage. But on that minimum he insists.

In his preface Mr. Podmore Bays :—

" The 11th of August should be observed as a day of humiliation by every learned Society in the civilised world, for on that date in 1784 a Commission, consisting of the most distinguished represen- tatives of Science in the most enlightened capital in Europe, pronounced the rejection of a pregnant scientific discovery—a discovery possibly rivalling in permanent significance all the contributions to the physical Sciences made by the two most famous members of the Commission—Lavoisier and Benjamin Franklin. Not that the report on Animal Magnetism Presented by Bailly and his colleagues did serious injustice to Mesmer him- self, or to his vaunted science. The magnetic fluid was a chimera, and Mesmer, it may be admitted, was perhaps three parts a charlatan. He had no pretensions to be a thinker : he stole his philosophy ready-made from a few • belated alchemists ; and his entire system of healing was based on a delusion. His extra- ordinary success was due to the lucky accident of the times."

Perhaps Mr. Podmore is rather unfair to the Comtnission in • this passage. It is true that they did not perceive the reality of mental suggestion, but their "terms of reference," so to speak, were to examine the pretensions of Mesmer to have discovered a flow of controllable magnetic force from the human body. Franklin, we may believe, had not a closed mind. His brain was as curious and as catholic as that of Leonardo da Vinci. But his mind was set to a particular investigation ; he no doubt wanted Mesmer to prove the nature of animal magnetism as he himself would have been ready to prove the nature of lightning. Failing to get any such proof, he consented to dismiss the subject. We cannot say more in blame of Bailly, Lavoisier, Franklin, and their col- leagues than that they failed to turn a particular investigation into a general one.

Mesmer believed that his flow of healing " magnetism" was a limited quantity, and needed conservation. Hence he invented his extraordinary "Baguet" :— "The Baguet was a large oaken tub, four or five feet in diameter and a foot or more in depth, closed by a wooden cover. Inside the tub were placed bottles full of water disposed in rows radiating from the centre, the necks in some of the rows pointing towards the centre, in others away from it. All these bottles had been previously ' magnetised' by Mesmer. Sometimes there were several rows of bottles, one above the other; the machine was then said to be at high pressure. The bottles rested on layers of powdered glass and iron filings. The tub itself was filled with water. The whole machine, it will be seen, was a kind of travesty of the galvanic cell. To carry out the resemblance, the cover of the tab was pierced with holes, through which passed slender iron rods of varying lengths, which were jointed and movable, so that ' they could be readily applied to any part of the patient's body. Round this battery the patients were seated in a circle, each with his iron rod. Further, a cord, attached at one end to the tub, was passed round the body of each of the sitters, so as to bind them all into a chain. Outside the first a second circle would frequently be formed, who would connect themselves together by holding hands. Mesmer, in a lilac robe, end his assistant operators—vigorous and handsome young men selected for the purpose—walked about the room, pointing -their fingers or an iron rod held in their hands at the diseased parts."

No one who has read anything of mesmerism requires to be told that Mesmer produced real and visible results, although the existence of the "magnetism": was imaginary. It was enough for the operations of mental, suggestion that the . . magnetism should be believed in. Frequently, the effects of . Mesmer's treatment were very violent and painful,—nothing less than recurrent convulsions.

Mesmerism led in a natural sequence to induced som- namtinlism and clairvoyance. Mesmerism, indeed, has been devoured by her children,—hypnotism, spiritualism, -theosophy, Christian Science, and the rest. - The dark

doctrines of Paracelsus and the sympathetic system • were primarily spiritual, but there was nothing spiritual about Mesmer. His magnetic fluid was a material, not a spiritual, influence. As Mr. Podmore says, he took the art of healing away from the Churches. The rise of Christian Science is specially interesting for this, that it completes one of those cycles in which all human experience seems to move; it seeks to re-establish the function of healing as a purely spiritual one. "The wheel has come full circle." Imagine Mesmer making an appeal to the religious faith of the eighteenth-century France to which he lectured ! Yet what a strange reflection that that sceptical world was in many ways more creduleus than a nation which is almost universally glad to declare its belief in God ! Is it not always so We must quote the entertaining anecdote about Braid, who demoestrated by a conclusive experiment that mental forces are superior, almost, one might say, indifferent, to the instruments they use :—

"An eminent physician' and mesmerist demonstrated to Braid the wonderful power of a magnet in inducing catalepsy in an entranced patient by mere contact with the surface of the skin. "Braid replied that he had in his possession an instrument endowed with still more marvellous powers. He placed this instrument in the patient's hand, and it produced catalepsy of both hands and arms; he reversed the position of the instrument, and the patient's hand opened. A single touch of the instrument caused any of the subject's limbs to rise and become stiffened; a second touch caused it to lose its rigidity and fall. Placed on the third finger of the left hand, it produced sleep, Removed and placed on the second finger of the same hand, it rendered the patient proof against all the mesmerist's endeavours to send her to sleep. Each of these results had been predicted by Braid within the hearing of the patient ; the instrument by which this modern magician secured obedience to his commands was nothing more than his portmanteau key and the ring on which it was suspended."

Mr. Podmore distinguishes between clairvoyance at a distance

and clairvoyance at close quarters. He gives examples of coincidences in clairvoyance at a distance which are too exact to be due to chance, and he finds the explanation in thought transference, whether direct or indirect. He thinks a similar explanation satisfactory in the case of Mrs. Piper's trance utterances. As for clairvoyance at close quarters (" when not due to fraud," says Mr. Podmore significantly), it indicates " extreme acuteness of vision, the result sometimes of training,

sometimes apparently of hyperaesthesia in the trance."

From the trance it is an easy step of the imagination to the world beyond. The association (or confusion) of the two spheres of the mind and the spirit is so inevitable and so fructifying that it needs the brains and consciences of men of science to direct it. If anaesthetics had not been invented when they were, the doctors would not have left mesmerism severely alone. The indifference to all that has grown gradually out of mesmerism may yet be corrected, and we

hold that an attitude, not necessarily of ac,deptance, but of concern, on the part of men of science is the best corrective to such .dangerous pretensions as those of Christian Science.