242 



ON SYMPATHY AND FASCINATION. 



half-hour lecture, I went, not without some incredulity, to the smith's shop, 

 with many other curious spectators, when we were eye-witnesses of the 

 complete success of his art. This, too, had been a troop-horse, and it waa 

 supposed, not without reason, that after regimental discipline had failed, no 

 other would be found availing". I observed that the animal seemed afraid 

 whenever Sullivan either spoke or looked at liim."* In common cases, 

 Mr. Townsend adds, even the mysterious preparation of a private interview 

 was not necessary, the animal becoming tame at once. We have here, there- 

 fore, another instance of most extraordinary and instantaneous ascendency 

 of one animal being over another, without any manifest medium of action, 

 which we are occasionally, but not often, called upon to witness. That it 

 could not have been force is clear ; and though natural firmness and intre- 

 pidity may do much, they by no means appear to have been sufficient in the 

 present case, and could, indeed, accomplish but little in the dark. Nor does 

 there seem to be any mode of accounting for such a control so reasonable as 

 that of a natural or artificial emanation from the fascinator, which we have 

 already adverted to ; and, if the last, obtained, perhaps, as in many of these 

 instances, by illining or impregnating the person of the operator with the 

 virtues of various plants unknown or little known to the rest of the world. 



Thus far we may proceed safely upon the subject before us. But some 

 theorizers have not rested satisfied here, and with much rhapsody of inven- 

 tion, have carried forward the same mysterious agency into the recesses of the 

 intellect, and contended that it is by a similar kind of medium, or, sometimes, 

 by a sort of elective attraction, operating invisibly through the moral world, 

 as the imperceptible powers before us operate in the physical, that mind pro- 

 duces occasionally an instantaneous influence upon mind ; whence, say they, 

 we are at times impelled, by a certain indescribable sympathy, to feel more 

 pleased with one person of less intellectual and perhaps even less moral 

 worth, than with another person, whose endowments in both respects are 

 confessedly superior : while others, pursuing the hallucination still farther, 

 have gravely suggested, that it is possibly by some such medium that an in- 

 tercourse is occasionally maintained between ourselves and the spirits of our 

 departed friends ; between this world and worlds around us. To hunt down 

 such vagaries would indeed be a thriftless employment ; and I only mention 

 them to show that philosophy has its dreams and romances as well as his- 

 tory or even poetry ; and that the principles of physics are as liable to per- 

 version as those of ethics. Philosophy is a pilgrim, for the most part, of 

 honest heart, clear foresight, and unornamented dress and manners; the 

 genuine bride to whom heaven has betrothed him is Reason, of celestial birth 

 and spotless virginity; and the fair fruit of so holy a union is truth, virtue, 

 sobriety, and order. But should ever the plain pilgrim play the truant, as 

 unfortunately in the present corrupt state of things we have reason to fear 

 has too frequently proved a fact, — should ever Philosophy migrate from his 

 proper hermitage, and in an hour of ebriety connect himself with the harlot 

 Imagination, what can be the result of so unlicensed a dalliance but a spawn 

 of monsters and miscreations ; of hideous and unreal existences ; of phan- 

 toms and will-o'-the-wisps, equally abhorred by God and man ; treacherously 

 hanging up their dim wildfire, in the pestilent bosom of mists and exhala- 

 tions, and from their murky shades alluring the incautious inquirer to bogs 

 and sloughs, and quagmires of wreck and ruin 1 



* Survey of the County of Cork, p. 438. 



