REPORT ON ANIMAL MAGNETISM. 147 



tions are excited ; I assert that imagination is one of the 

 phenomena engendered by this agent ; that its greater or 

 less abundance in this or that among our organs, may 

 totally change the normal intellectual state of individ- 

 uals." 



Everybody agrees that too great a flow of blood to- 

 wards the brain produces a stupefaction of the mind. 

 Analogous or inverse effects might evidently be pro- 

 duced by a subtle, invisible, imponderable fluid, by a 

 sort of nervous fluid, or magnetic fluid (if this term be 

 preferred), circulating through our organs. And the 

 commissioners took good care not to speak on this sub- 

 ject of impossibility. Their thesis was more modest; 

 they contented themselves with saying that nothing de- 

 onstrated the existence of such a fluid. Imagination, 

 therefore, had no share in their report ; but in Servan's 

 refutation, on the contrary, imagination was the chief 

 actor. 



One thing that was still less proved, if possible, than 

 any of those that we have been speaking of, is the influ- 

 ence that the magnetic fluid of the magnetizer might 

 exert on the magnetized person. 



In magnetism, properly so called, in that which phys- 

 icists have studied with so much care and success, the 

 phenomena are constant. They are reproduced exactly 

 under the same conditions of form, of duration, and of 

 quantity, when certain bodies, being present to each 

 other, find themselves exactly in the same relative po- 

 sitions. That is the essential and necessary character of 

 all purely material and mechanical action. Was it thus 

 in the pretended phenomena of animal magnetism ? In 

 no way. To-day the crises would occur in the space of 

 some seconds ; to-morrow they may require several en- 



