PHRENOPATHY. 401 



Shall we then say that here we have a stream from the ancients' 

 arts of phrenopathy or putopathy* and a dawning recognition of 

 the spirituality of disease and of cure ? I do not think that loss of 

 faith and the other inward graces is the tap root of bodily sickness ; 

 and that fears, apathies, hatreds, and self-seekings are the sowers 

 who go forth to sow poison through our frames. On the other 

 hand, the renewal of faith,f even when impressed from without, 



* rno-Tic, faith. 



t With respect to the operation of medicines upon and through the imagina- 

 tion, and to the operation of charms, this belongs to the personal side of the art 

 of healing, and medicine cannot relinquish it without quitting its hold upon 

 some of the principal departments of man. When incantation ceased, and was 

 exploded by newer thoughts, its principle should have been carefully investigated, 

 and the virtue and goodness, if any, which lay at the core, should have been 

 retained. But in acting upon the imagination, one objection may be noticed, 

 which has a large, perhaps the principal share in banishing this kind of hygiene 

 from practice ; and yet, which rightly considered, is no objection at all. The 

 patients, so the doctors tell us, no longer believe in imagination-treatment; 

 and because they do not believe, the treatment will have no efficacy. We reply, 

 it makes little matter whether they believe or not. And the reason is clear. 

 For belief is two-fold : first, educational or scientific, but second, fundamental 

 or organic. To illustrate my meaning, I will relate an anecdote which happened 

 to myself with a friend who was a person of strong faculties, and deeply imbued 

 with current modes of philosophizing. We were discussing the reality of 

 ghosts and apparitions, and my friend argued with honest stoutness that they 

 were flimsy illusions, and had no claim on the attention of strong-minded peo- 

 ple. But being as candid as he was strong, he presently added : " I don't know 

 how it is, but when I talk of such things, I feel a cold stream down the back." 

 Here was a case in which the same good man was plaintiff in one part of 

 his body, and defendant in another : he denied ghosts with his lips and be- 

 lieved them with his back-bone : and fortified as he was by such arguments 

 negative as could be had, he was still, by witness of the " Coldstream," as capa- 

 ble of receiving a dose of fright as if he had been "a sick girl." His body, which 

 is substantial, credited more than his soul : Balaam's ass saw the spirits which 

 Balaam could not see. This is merely an illustration of the existence of a cor- 

 poreal faith, when the mental faith is deficient; and of the efficacy of the corpo- 

 real faith in producing bodily alterations. Thus it is that charms, personal 

 suggestions, mesmerism, minute doses of medicine, &c. &c, act upon the con- 

 scious man without the active concurrrence of his reason, nay, often in spite of 

 it. For the body itself knows bodily what is true and influential, whether the 

 mind knows it mentally or not. We have therefore every ground, despite the 

 absence of faith in the higher sense, to persevere in the remedies of faith, which 

 will not cease to cure though we be unfaithful. Thus it is well known that 

 warts can be charmed away where their owner has no faitli in the process ; and 

 for this reason ; that though he has no educational belief in the charm, his imag- 



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