MESMERISM. 61 



have been detected and exposed, but the more consistent 

 adherents of Mesmerism have complained, and perhaps not 

 unjustly, that quacks and impostors, for the sake of money- 

 making by sensational exhibitions, have perverted the 

 scientific truths which they maintain, and thereby brought 

 discredit on phenomena which are beyond dispute. It is not 

 the purpose here to investigate whether Mesmerism be true 

 or false. The present writer is too little acquainted with 

 its phenomena to pronounce a judgment one way or other. 

 He has seen some few attempts at Mesmerising, but they 

 must have been exceedingly bungled and blundering 

 attempts indeed if Mesmerism be anything but a stupid 

 hoax. The object of the following remarks is not to 

 investigate Mesmerism, but to consider whether we have 

 not within the limits of human knowledge, and admittedly 

 familiar experience, a set of natural facts far surpassing 

 in their reality all the phenomena which Mesmerism now 

 professes to have successfully manifested, and with some of 

 the peculiarities of which Mesmerists may after all be 

 only floundering in the dark. 



It is one of the disadvantages of the student of nature 

 that life-long familiarity with certain phenomena too often 

 leads him rather to assume them as matter of course than 

 to study them as matter of fact to regard them as too 

 commonplace for investigation, because it is accepted as a 

 conclusion too trite for further iteration that they are 

 exhaustively seen under their familiar aspects, and that 

 man must know and understand fully and to the uttermost 

 that which he is encountering every day. Were man's in- 

 tellectuality equal to his opportunities there would be much 

 probability in this conclusion. And it is only when we 

 are privileged through the eyes and understanding of 

 some rarely endowed intelligence, whose mind has opened 

 up a new page of nature where we had thought all was 

 already known, that we discover the fallacy of our assump- 



