CHAP. XVII. 



HYPNOTISM AND PSYCHICAL RESEARCH. 203 



the statement, a little further on, that " no scientific 

 observer has yet confirmed the statements of mesmerists 

 as to clairvoyance, reading of sealed letters, influence on 

 unconscious persons at a distance, or the like " a state- 

 ment the exact opposite of the fact, since the nine mem- 

 bers of the commission of the Academy of Medicine, 

 Professor Gregory and the other gentlemen mentioned 

 above, as well as a large number of physicians and others 

 on the Continent, must surely be held to be, individually 

 and as a whole, " scientific observers," or the term can 

 have no meaning. Biichner, Spitta, and other antago- 

 nistic Continental writers, also appealed to the commis- 

 sion of 1784 as having exposed " the swindle of magnetic 

 cures," apparently in complete ignorance of the report 

 of 1831; and Eiichner also refers to the commission of 

 1837 as reporting against clairvoyance, without any 

 reference to the more weighty report of 1831 in its favor. 

 One more example as to the mode of treatment of evi- 

 dence for the reality of clairvoyance. Dr. Carpenter 

 describes some of his own visits to Alexis and Adolphe 

 Didier, accompanied by Dr. Forbes; and because they 

 saw nothing which was to them absolutely conclusive, he 

 leads the reader to think that nothing really conclusive 

 had ever been obtained. But Dr. Lee, a physician of 

 repute, and therefore presumably as good a witness as 

 Dr. Carpenter or Dr. Forbes, in his well-known work 

 on Animal Magnetism, devotes twenty-two pages to an 

 account of his own personal experiments with Alexis at 

 Brighton in 1849, including such a number and variety 

 of striking tests as to entirely outweigh any number of 

 negative results like those of Dr. Carpenter. And in 

 addition to these, other special tests of the most stringent 



