396 HEALTH. 



no relation to miracles and revelations, excepting that it imitates 

 them afar off, and, like all other things in the world, has a common 

 connection with God.* 



Very different from mesmerism, and yet suggested by it, is the 

 process discovered by James Braid of Manchester, and by him 

 called hypnotism. This is probably but one of a number of arts 

 to which we shall give the generic name of phrenopathy, for it 

 produces its effects principally as actions of mind upon mind. 



Being unsatisfied with the pretensions of mesmerism, and skepti- 

 cal of its truth, Mr. Braid entered the field as a disprover, but soon 

 witnessed phenomena which appeared to him to be real, though 

 susceptible of another explanation than the mesmeric. It struck 

 him that the facts were the result of abstraction or attention carried 

 to excess, and he accordingly tried the experiment of causing pa- 

 tients to stare at any object secured or held above their foreheads, 

 so as to make the stare assume the attitude of intense contemplation. 

 Success attended this mode in many instances, and sleep was induced 

 in a few minutes. Mr. B. usually selects some bright object, as a 

 silver lancet case, held in the mid-line between the eyes, and the 

 patient gazes thereat with fixed stare until the effects are produced 

 — the "double internal squint" upwards being the most potential 

 direction of the eyes for the purpose. Soon the eyes shut, and a 

 state is produced, varying in depth from mere somnolency to double 

 consciousness, or catalepsy. 



The preliminary state is that of abstraction, produced by fixed 

 gaze upon some unexciting and empty thing (for poverty of object 

 engenders abstraction), and this abstraction is the logical premise of 

 what follows. Abstraction tends to become more and more abstract, 

 narrower and narrower; it tends to unity, and afterwards to nullity. 

 There then the patient is, at the summit of attention, with no object 

 left — a mere statue of attention — a listening, expectant life ; a per- 

 fectly undistracted faculty, dreaming of a lessening and lessening 

 mathematical point; the end of his mind sharpened away to nothing. 



* The Zoist, a quarterly journal, in its ninth year's existence, affords the best 

 history of the progress of mesmerism as a branch of the healing art. We refer 

 our readers to it as an evidence of what mesmerism is good for. 



