MESMERISM. 393 



pressure of fresh spiritual air goes right through the frame. This 

 alone is the greatest of alteratives — more than traveling, more than 

 the difference between hot and cold, clear and misty, winter and 

 summer. The organism breathes with another life in all its parts. 

 For the time, every sense, in stomach, spleen, liver, heart and brain 

 and every idea that travels in the fluids (pp. 55, 152 — 154, 200 — 

 224, 351), is changed; self is voluntarily absent; and the functions 

 go on minus their old routine of habits. The nerves and arteries 

 which are secreting a morbid growth, a tumor, for example, and 

 which have got to think that they must lay stone to stone of this 

 vice, and build a fresh piece of it every day, suddenly lose their habit- 

 ude in the interest of a new spirit, change their minds, set the absorb- 

 ents to work to remove the architecture of evil, and pursue their 

 daily course for their legitimate objects. The better man, in short, 

 is persuasive upon the worser, inside just as outside : it is no sense- 

 less odyle or fluid that causes the effect, but a human although 

 molecular operation. Fluids, unless they are men also, illustrate 

 nothing, nor will any explanation satisfy, unless it be a rest, and 

 exclude the call for a second explanation. 



Mesmerism emphatically gives new or other life to those who 

 need it ; and it does this by the mere form and attitude which the 

 agent and patient assume relatively to each other. The human 

 world is full of powers in a state of balance and indifference. 

 Change the posture of anything therein, and the whole has to re- 

 adjust itself to a new balance — a rush of forces takes place, and 

 currents pass to and fro until the equilibrium is recovered. The 

 moral and the physical are both under this statical law. Hence, if 

 you desire to produce forces, you have only to find the neighborhood 

 of the fluids or spirit powers, and by creating a low level on the one 

 hand, you also make relative height, and have a deeper fall for your 

 forceful waters to descend. 



These remarks are too brief to be called a theory of mesmeric 

 cure, nor do they touch manifestly upon those parts of mesmerism 

 that are most liable to be discredited. We labor however under 

 want of space to develop the subject as it deserves, and we can now 

 only say, that out of the same law of Correspondence which is the 

 master-principle of science, it is easy to deduce the explanation of 



