HYSTERIA AND DEMONISM. 385 



and the professional somnambulists offer as a spectacle to the credulity 

 of the public. If they had observed for themselves, if they had han- 

 dled with their own hands and seen with their own eyes the phenomena 

 of which they deny the existence, I do not doubt that they would have 

 had an entirely different opinion. Is it possible to suppose that all the 

 somnambulists that have appeared during the last hundred years would 

 have feigned the same symptoms just to conform themselves to the 

 fancies of the little peasant Victor, the first case of the Marquis de 

 Puysegur ? How, by what strange divination, can they all exhibit 

 the same signs of the same nervous affection ? Would it not be a 

 really marvelous fact if a deception carried on for a hundred years 

 through all Europe should everywhere and always present the same 

 features, and if all the physicians, all the men of science who had de- 

 voted themselves to the study of it, should have become victims to the 

 same unexplainable imposture ? 



Somnambulism must, then, be regarded as a veritable disease, the 

 symptoms of which are as well described as those of hysteria and 

 epilepsy. The only remarkable and obscure side of the study of it is 

 that the nervous affection can be induced by exterior manoeuvres, the 

 method of the action of which escapes us. Our ignorance of the cause 

 of the phenomenon furnishes us no reason for denying its existence. 

 Hereafter, possibly in the course of a few years, we may arrive at an 

 exact acquaintance, not with the symptoms, which are quite well known 

 now, but with the physiological causes of somnambulism. We have 

 reason to hope that the empirical processes which are at present em- 

 ployed will be replaced by scientific methods, the trustworthiness of 

 which no one will be able to put in doubt, and the efficacy of which 

 will endure every test. 



We have seen, in the course of these investigations, that there are 

 diseases which, without producing insanity properly so called, deeply 

 disturb the functions of the understanding. The disturbances they 

 occasion are certainly wonderful, and calculated to excite surprise ; 

 but we are justified in affirming that they are subject to natural laws, 

 and not to the fancy of the seven million four hundred and five thousand 

 nine hundred and twenty-six devils of hell. This was not the opinion 

 of the judges of the seventeenth century ; and it is not one of the 

 least of the benefits that science has conferred upon us, that it has 

 affirmed and proved the innocence of the miserable sufferers from 

 these diseases who were formerly consigned to the stake. 

 vol. xvii. 25 



