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In the first rank of this category of works we must place the elegant pamphlet published by Servan, under the title of Doubts of a Provincial, proposed to the Gentlemen Medical Commissioners commanded by the King to examine into Animal Magnetism. The appearance of this little work of Servan's was saluted in the camp of the Mesmerists with cries of triumph and joy.
He would then take out a knife and feel of the edge, and when he turned around to the girl whom he left on the chair, she had fled behind the scenes, to the intense amusement of the greater part of the audience, and to the amazement of the mesmerists who were present. "Why! where's my little girl?" he asked, with feigned astonishment.
And not discarding, as I own I should have been originally induced to do, the queries or suggestions adventured by Bacon in his discursive speculations on Nature, to wit, 'that there be many things, some of them inanimate, that operate upon the spirits of men by secret sympathy and antipathy, and to which Bacon gave the quaint name of 'imaginants, so even that wand, of which I have described to you the magic-like effects, may have had properties communicated to it by which it performs the work of the magician, as mesmerists pretend that some substance mesmerized by them can act on the patient as sensibly as if it were the mesmerizer himself.
Among his pupils, usually called mesmerists, was Puysèyur, who discovered, in 1784, the state which was called artificial somnambulism, a kind of sleep in which the ideas and feelings of the magnetized can be guided by the magnetizer. Here evidently was the first recognition of the psychotherapeutic variation which we call today hypnotism.
We know how the mesmerists would account for this phenomenon of hygienic introvision and clairvoyance. But here, there is no mesmerizer, unless the patient can be supposed to mesmerize herself.
Men and women contend for each other in the lists of love, like rival mesmerists; the active and adroit decide their challenges in the sports of the body; and the sedentary sit down to chess or conversation. All sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same degree, solitary and selfish; and every durable bond between human beings is founded in or heightened by some element of competition.
"I'm afraid you don't try to get well, Miss Callender," he said. "Does trying make any difference?" demanded Phillida. "Yes, to be sure; that's the way that the mesmerists and magnetizers, and the new faith-cure people work their cures largely. They enlist the will, and they do some good. They often help chronic invalids whom the doctors have failed to benefit." Dr.
Servan's pamphlet seemed at the time the anchor of salvation for the Mesmerists. The adepts still borrow from it their principal arguments. Let us see, then, whether it has really shaken Bailly's report. From the very commencing lines, the celebrated Attorney-General puts the question in terms deficient in exactness.
"It would also be requisite not to entrust command," Montaigne says, "to men who would fly from apples more than from arquebusades." It is not only amongst the corpuscular emanations of living animals that the Mesmerists asserted conflicts to occur. They unhesitatingly extended their speculations to dead bodies.
"I didn't think of it all by myself," he bleated. "It was what the Dawn woman said, and then when I mentioned that I had some grudges agin' the same parties she wrote the notes, and the perfessor planned the rest, so't we could both get even. But it wasn't my notion. I reckon he mesmerized me into it. I ain't to blame. Them mesmerists has awful powers."
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