vivid and pure that obtains the able relationship and parallelism. name of the Animal Spirits ;* and Whatever state of the atmosphere at the close of his great fragment tends to accumulate and insulate upon Man, he asserts that 'this electricity in the body, promotes flame is of no other nature than all equally' (says Mr. Townshend) 'the the fires which are in inanimate power and facility with which I bodies.' This notion does but fore- influence others mesmerically.' stall the more recent doctrine that What Mr. Townshend thus observes electricity is more or less in all, or in himself, American physicians nearly all, known matter. Now, and professors of chemistry depose whether in the electric fluid or some to have observed in those modern other fluid akin to it of which we magicians, the mediums of (soknow still less, thus equally per- called) 'spirit manifestation.' They vading all matter, there may be a state that all such mediums are of certain magnetic property more the electric temperament, thus active, more operative upon sym- everywhere found allied with the pathy in some human constitutions ecstatic, and their power varies in than in others, and which can ac-proportion as the state of the atcount for the mysterious power Imosphere serves to depress or aughave spoken of, is a query I might ment the electricity stored in themsuggest, but not an opinion I would selves. Here, then, in the midst of hazard. For an opinion I must have that basis of experience or authority which I do not need when I submit a query to the experience and authority of others. Still the supposition conveyed in the query is so far worthy of notice, that the ecstatic temperament (in which phrase I comprehend all constitutional mystics) is peculiarly sensitive to electric atmospheric influences. This is a fact which most medical observers will have remarked in the range of their practice. Accordingly, I was prepared to find Mr. Hare Townshend, in his interesting work, state that he himself was of 'the electric temperament,' sparks flying from his hair when combed in the dark, &c. That accomplished writer, whose veracity no one would impugn, affirms that 'between this electrical endowment and whatever mesmeric properties he might possess, there is a remark

* Descartes, L'Homme, vol. iv. p. 345. Cousin's Edition.

Ibid., p. 428.
Facts in Mesmerism.

vagrant phenomena, either too hastily dismissed as altogether the tricks of fraudful imposture, or too credulously accepted as supernatural portents-here, at least, in one generalized fact, we may, perhaps, find a starting-point, from which inductive experiment may arrive soon, or late, at a rational theory. But, however the power of which we are speaking (a power accorded to special physical temperament) may or may not be accounted for by some patient student of nature, I am persuaded that it is in that power we are to seek for whatever is not wholly imposture, in the attributes assigned to magic or witchcraft. It is well said, by a writer who has gone into the depth of these subjects with the research of a scholar and the science of a pathologist, 'that if magic had exclusively reposed on credulity and falsehood, its reign would never have endured so long. But that its art took its origin in singular phenomena, proper to certain affections of the nerves, or manifested in the conditions of sleep. These pheno

it.' 'Some,' he says, 'are naturally magicians.' And this fact is emphatically insisted upon by the mystics of our own middle ages, who state that a man must be born a magician; in other words, that the gift is constitutional, though developed by practice and art. Now, that this gift and its practice should principally obtain in imperfect states of civilization, and fade into insignificance in the busy social enlightenment of cities, may be accounted for by reference to the known influences of imagination.

mena, the principle of which was at ❘ that of those instructed in the mafirst unknown, served to root faith gical art' only a few are capable of in magic, and often abused even enlightened minds. The enchanters and magicians arrived, by divers practices, at the faculty of provoking in other brains a determined order of dreams, of engendering hallucinations of all kinds, of inducing fits of hypnotism, trance, mania, during which the persons so affected imagined that they saw, heard, touched supernatural beings, conversed with them, proved their influences, assisted at prodigies of which magic proclaimed itself to possess the secret. The public, the enchanters, and the enchanted were equally In the cruder states of social life dupes.** Accepting this explana- not only is imagination more fretion, unintelligible to no physician quently predominant over all other of a practice so lengthened as mine faculties, but it has not the healthful has been, I draw from it the corol- vents which the intellectual competilary, that as these phenomena are tion of cities and civilization affords. exhibited only by certain special The man who in a savage tribe, or affections, to which only certain in the dark feudal ages, would be a special constitutions are susceptible, magician, is in our century a poet, so not in any superior faculties of an orator, a daring speculator, an intellect, or of spiritual endowment, inventive philosopher. In other but in peculiar physical tempera- words, his imagination is drawn to ments, often strangely disordered, pursuits congenial to those amongst the power of the sorcerer in affecting whom it works. It is the tendency the imagination of others is to be of all intellect to follow the direcsought. In the native tribes of tions of the public opinion amidst Australasia the elders are instructed which it is trained. Where a magiin the arts of this so-called sorcery, cian is held in reverence or awe, but only in a very few constitutions there will be more practitioners of does instruction avail to produce magic than where a magician is effects in which the savages recog- despised as an impostor or shut up nise the powers of a sorcerer: it is as a lunatic. In Scandinavia, so with the Obi of the negroes. The before the introduction of Christifascination of Obi is an unques- anity, all tradition records the tionable fact, but the Obi man can- wonderful powers of the Vala, or not be trained by formal lessons: witch, who was then held in revehe is born a fascinator, as a poet is rence and honour. Christianity born a poet. It is so with the Lap- was introduced, and the early landers, of whom Tornæus reports Church denounced the Vala as the instrument of Satan, and from that moment down dropped the majestic prophetess into a miserable and execrated old hag!"

La Magie et l'Astrologie dans l'Antiquité et au Moyen-Age. Par L. F. Alfred Maury, Membre de l'Institut.

P. 225.

"The ideas you broach," said I,

musingly," have at moments crossed | favourite authority, the illustrious me, though I have shrunk from re- Müller, who was himself in the ducing them to a theory which is habit of 'seeing different images in but one of pure hypothesis. But the field of vision when he lay this magic, after all, then, you quietly down to sleep, asserts that would place in the imagination of these images are not merely prethe operator, acting on the imagina-sented to the fancy, but that even tion of those whom it affects? the images of dreams are really Here, at least, I can follow you, to a certain extent, for here we get back into the legitimate realm of physiology."

"And possibly," said Faber, "we may find hints to guide us to useful examination, if not to complete solution, of problems that, once demonstrated, may lead to discoveries of infinite value-hints, I say, in two writers of widely opposite genius-Van Helmont and Bacon. Van Helmont, of all the medieval mystics, is, in spite of his many extravagant whims, the one whose intellect is the most suggestive to the disciplined reasoners of our day. He supposed that the faculty which he calls Phantasy, and which we familiarly call Imagination, is invested with the power of creating for itself ideas independent of the senses, each idea clothed in a form fabricated by the imagination, and becoming an operative entity. This notion is so far favoured by modern physiologists, that Lincke reports a case where the eye itself was extirpated; yet the extirpation was followed by the appearance of luminous figures before the orbit. And again, a woman, stone-blind, complained of luminous images, with pale colours, before her eyes.' Abercrombie mentions the case 'of a lady quite blind, her eyes being also disorganized and sunk, who never walked out without seeing a little old woman in a red cloak who seemed to walk before her.** Your

She had no illusions when within doors.-Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, p. 277. (15th Edition.)

seen,' and that any one may satisfy himself of this by accustoming himself regularly to open his eyes when waking after a dream-the images seen in the dream are then sometimes visible, and can be observed to disappear gradually.' He confirms this statement, not only by the result of his own experience, but by the observations made by Spinoza, and the yet higher authority of Aristotle, who accounts for spectral appearance as the internal action of the sense of vision.* And this opinion is favoured by Sir David Brewster, whose experience leads him to suggest that the objects of mental contemplation may be seen as distinctly as external objects, and will occupy the same local position in the axis of vision as if they had been formed by the agency of light.' Be this as it may, one fact remains, that images can be seen even by the blind as distinctly and vividly as you and I now see the stream below our feet and the opossums at play upon yonder boughs. Let us come next to some remarkable suggestions of Lord Bacon. In his Natural History, treating of the force of the imagination, and the help it receives 'by

* Müller, Physiology of the Senses, Baley's translation, pp. 1068-1395, and elsewhere. Mr. Bain, in his thoughtful and suggestive work on the Senses and Intellect, makes very powerful use of these statements in support of his proposition, which Faber advances in other words, viz., "the return of the nervous currents exactly on their old track in revived sensations."

one man working by another,' he
cites an instance he had witnessed
of a kind of juggler, who could tell
a person what card he thought of.
He mentioned this 'to a pretended
learned man, curious in such
things,' and this sage said to him,
'It is not the knowledge of the
man's thought, for that is proper to
God, but the enforcing of a thought
upon him, and binding his imagina-
tion by a stronger, so that he could
think of no other card.' You see
this sage anticipated our modern
electro-biologists! And the learned
man then shrewdly asked Lord
Bacon, 'Did the juggler tell the
card to the man himself who had
thought of it, or bid another tell
it?' 'He bade another tell it,' an-
swered Lord Bacon. 'I thought
so,' returned his learned acquaint-
ance, 'for the juggler himself could
not have put on so strong an ima-
gination; but by telling the card to
the other, who believed the juggler
was some strange man who could do
strange things, that other man
caught a strong imagination. The
whole story is worth reading, be-
cause Lord Bacon evidently thinks
it conveys a guess worth examining.
And Lord Bacon, were he now
living, would be the man to solve

* Perhaps it is for the reason suggested in the text, viz., that the magician requires the interposition of a third imagination between his own and that of the consulting believer, and that any learned adept

in (so-called) magic will invariably refuse to exhibit without the presence of a third person. Hence the author of Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, printed at Paris, 1852-53-a book less remarkable for its learning than for the earnest belief of a scholar of our own day in the reality of the art of which he records the history -insists much on the necessity of rigidly observing Le Ternaire, in the number of persons who assist in an enchanter's experiments.

the mysteries that branch out of
mesmerism or (so-called) spiritual
manifestation, for he would not pre-
tend to despise their phenomena for
fear of hurting his reputation for
good sense. Bacon then goes on to
state that there are three ways to
fortify the imagination: 'First, au-
thority derived from belief in an
art and in the man who exercises
it; secondly, means to quicken
and corroborate the imagination;
thirdly, means to repeat and refresh
it.' For the second and the third
he refers to the practices of magic,
and proceeds afterwards to state on
what things imagination has most
force: 'upon things that have the
lightest and easiest motions, and,
therefore, above all, upon the spirits
of men, and, in them, on such affec-
tions as move lightest-in love, in
fear, in irresolution. And,' adds
Bacon, earnestly, in a very different
spirit from that which dictates to
the sages of our time the philosophy
of rejecting without trial that which
belongs to the Marvellous, and
whatsoever is of this kind, should
be thoroughly inquired into.' And
this great founder or renovator of
the sober inductive system of inves-
tigation, even so far leaves it a
matter of speculative inquiry, whe-
ther imagination may not be so
powerful that it can actually operate
upon a plant, that he says, 'This
likewise should be made upon
plants, and that diligently, as if you
should tell a man that such a tree
would die this year, and will him,
at these and these times, to go unto
it and see how it thriveth.' I pre-
sume that no philosopher has fol-
lowed such recommendations: had
some great philosopher done so,
possibly we should by this time
know all the secrets of what is
popularly called witchcraft."

And as Faber here paused there came a strange laugh from the fan

tastic she-oak-tree overhanging the | tioners of mesmerism and electrostream-a wild, impish laugh.

biology, and give a certain foundation of truth to the old tales of magic and witchcraft. You imply that Margrave may be a person thus gifted, and hence the influence he unquestionably exercised over Lilian, We walked on for some minutes and over, perhaps, less innocent in musing silence, and the rude log- agents, charmed or impelled by his hut in which my wise companion will. And not discarding, as I own had his home came in view-the I should have been originally inflocks grazing on undulous pastures, duced to do, the queries or suggesthe kine drinking at a watercourse tions adventured by Bacon in his fringed by the slender gum-trees, and a few fields, laboriously won from the luxuriant grass-land, rippling with the wave of corn.