THE PSYCHO-PHYSIOLOGICAL SCIENCES. 731 



process (February 22, 1839) is publislied in Townshend's "Facts in 

 Mesmerism." 



As the limits assigned this essay do not admit a complete review 

 of this little book, it may now be dismissed, but not to oblivion, for it 

 is destined to survive all other Avritings of Dr. Carpenter, and to be 

 remembered as long as Horkey's letter against Galileo. Posterity 

 will be amused to think that Whately's " Historic Doubts " concern- 

 ing the existence of Napoleon Bonaparte, written for amusement, 

 were more than matched by Carpenter's doubts of the existence of 

 any mesmeric or spiritual facts, written in all the earnestness of 

 a dogmatic and infallible philosophizer. In the struggle between 

 stubborn vituperative materialism and comprehensive science, the 

 battle-ground is at the psycho -physiological junction of the two 

 worlds. Man, belonging to both the spiritual and the material world, 

 cannot be properly studied except as a psycho-physiological being, 

 and those who refuse to do this simply ignore anthropology. The 

 effort of ultra -bigoted materialists is to exclude all agencies not 

 thoroughly material all that is intermediate between the psychic 

 and the physiological to crush its students and teachers by per- 

 sonal or professional ostracism and accusations of lying knavery 

 and hallucination. The malignity of the attacks is sufficient proof 

 that they do not originate in the love of science or of truth, even if 

 they were not often distinguished by mendacity, the mildest example 

 of which is the late assertion of Dr. Forbes Winslow, of London, that 

 " this form of delusion" (spiritualism) "is very prevalent in America, 

 and the asylums contain many of its victims; nearly 10,000 persons 

 having gone insane on the subject are confined in the public asylums 

 of the United States." This is quite a fair example of the truthfulness 

 of the majority of the statements on that side of the question. The fact 

 is, however, that the published reports of our fifty-eight insane asy- 

 lums show but 412 from religious excitement, which is less than two 

 per cent, of the whole number, and but 59 from spiritualism, which is 

 twenty-six hundredths of one per cent, of the whole number in these 

 asylums (23,328). 



Dr. Carpenter and the majority of physiologists prefer to culti- 

 vate physiology as a purely material science, and reduce man as neai'ly 

 as possible to a chemical and dynamic apparatus. I have preferred 

 to cultivate physiology in a more philosophic way, recognizing the 

 eternal man who inhabits the body, as well as the transient physical 

 form, and discovering a new class of facts which render our chemi- 

 cal and anatomical physiology far more philosophic and intelligible. 

 What a blind groping in the dark rigidly materialistic physiology 

 appears to one who has gained that full knowledge of our complex 

 constitution which constitutes our anthropology ! I do not mean by 

 this that mesmerism and spiritualism combined with mechanical phys- 

 iology constitute anthropology : far from it. Both mesmerism and spir- 



