6i6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



when placed on the front seat of the carriage, pleases himself with the 

 fancy that he is guiding the horse, when all the time his strong father 

 behind him is quietly holding and pulling the reins. In all experiments 

 with living human beings, as in the special branch that we call thera- 

 peutics, it is oftentimes not what we do, but how we do it, that deter- 

 mines the results. 



As regards this first point — the action of mind on body — I may say 

 that, by a series of experiments not yet published, but a brief abstract 

 of which has been twice presented to this Association, it has been 

 proved that, by properly turning the mind of the patient on his body, 

 through excitations of the emotions of wonder and special expectation, 

 it is possible not only to relieve for the time various functional dis- 

 eases, but in many instances to perfectly and permanently cure them ; 

 and it was also shown that organic or structural diseases may be 

 relieved in the same way, in some cases, more satisfactorily than by any 

 objective medical treatment whatever. The method by Avhich the emo- 

 tions are to be acted upon for the purposes of mental therapeutics are 

 now so far organized into a science that any one who will make himself 

 practically familiar with the subject can obtain the same results. The 

 first mistake of Charcot and his coadjutors in France, and his followers 

 in England and in Germany, was in assuming that such effects as the 

 orderly, uniform reappearance of the sense of the different colors in 

 hysterical women, and the spnmetrical transference of sensory phe- 

 nomena from one side of the body to the other, under the local appli- 

 cation of metallic disks in hemianeesthesia, could not be produced 

 subjectively by the mind of the patient. Such an assumption would 

 never have been made by any one who had performed or witnessed the 

 experiments in mental therapeutics of which I have spoken ; for, again 

 and again, not only in hysteria, but in other forms of disease, and in 

 conditions not distinctively nervous, I have obtained results which, in 

 definiteness, in quantity, and in permanence, are far more imposing, 

 proving beyond question that, when all the sources of error were con- 

 sidered and provided for, the results were entirely independent of any 

 objective power in the means employed — were, in short, subjective 

 purely ; applications of metals, or wood, or paper, or no applications at 

 all, provided the subject expected them, being equally effective. 



Science is not a matter of opinion ; its very essence is demonstra- 

 tion ; and the question whether, in any given experiments, the results 

 are subjective or objective, can be brought entirely out of all discussion 

 and all opinion, provided the elements of error are understood and 

 avoided. Indeed, all discussion in scientific matters must be, in logical 

 strictness, unscientific : if we know anything, there may be need for 

 statement, of explanation, of illustration, but none for discussion ; if we 

 do not know, the course of wisdom is to keep silence until we do. 

 With the formulated six sources of error before them, and the methods 

 of protecting themselves against them, the experiments of Charcot 



