To modern science a vacuum is impossible. Given ten feet of vacuum, and the world is in ruins! To materialists especially the world is absolutely full, everything is closely linked and connected, and acts mechanically.
“The world,” said Diderot, “as a result of mere chance is more intelligible than God. The multiplicity of causes, and the immeasurable number of throws that chance presupposes, sufficiently account for creation. Given the Aeneid and all the letters necessary to set it up, if you grant me time and space, by dint of tossing the letters, I should bring out the combination forming the Aeneid.” These wretched men, who would deify everything rather than confess a God, shrank no less from the infinite divisibility of matter which is implied in the nature of an imponderable force. Locke and Condillac at that time delayed by fifty years the immense advance which natural science is now making under the conception of unity which we owe to the great Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.
Some honest minds, devoid of system, convinced by the facts they had conscientiously studied, persisted in holding the doctrine of Mesmer, who discerned the existence in man of a penetrating influence, giving one individual power over another, and brought into play by the will; an influence which is curative when the fluid is abundant, and which acts as a duel between two wills—the evil to be cured, and the will to cure it. The phenomena of somnambulism, hardly suspected by Mesmer, were detected by MM. de Puységur and Deleuze; but the Revolution brought a pause in these discoveries, which left the men of learning and the scoffers in possession of the field.
Among the small number of believers were some physicians; these seceders were persecuted by their brethren till the day of their death. The respectable faculty of doctors in Paris turned against the Mesmerists with all the rigor of a religious warfare, and were as cruel in their hatred as it was possible to be in a period of Voltairean tolerance. The orthodox physicians refused to meet in consultation with those who adhered to the Mesmerian heresy. In 1820 these reputed heresiarchs were still the object of this unformulated proscription. The disasters and storms of the Revolution did not extinguish this scientific hostility. None but priests, lawyers, and physicians can hate in this way. The “gown” is always terrible. But are not ideas certain to be more implacable than things? Doctor Bouvard, a friend of Minoret’s, accepted the new creed, and to his dying day persisted in the scientific faith to which he sacrificed the peace of his whole life—for he was the pet aversion of the Paris Faculty. Minoret, one of the bravest supporters of the encyclopedists, and the most redoubtable adversary of Deslon, Mesmer’s chief disciple, since his pen had great weight in this dispute, quarreled beyond remedy with his old comrade; he did worse, he persecuted him. His behavior to Bouvard must have caused him the only repentance that can have clouded the serenity of his declining life.
Since Doctor Minoret’s retirement to Nemours, the science of imponderable agents—the only name applicable to magnetism of which the phenomena ally it so closely with electricity and light—had made immense progress, in spite of the unfailing mockery of the Paris world of science. Phrenology and physiognomy, the sciences of Gall and Lavater, twins, of which one is to the other as cause to effect, demonstrated to the eyes of more than one physiologist certain traces of the intangible fluid which is the basis of the phenomena of human will, giving rise to passions and habits, to the forms of the features and of the skull. Magnetic facts too, the miracles of somnambulism, and those of divination and ecstasy, allowing us to enter into the world of spirit, were multiplying. The strange tale of the apparitions seen by Martin, a farmer, which were amply proved, and that peasant’s interview with Louis XVIII; the statements as to Swedenborg’s intercourse with the dead, seriously accepted in Germany; Walter Scott’s narratives of the results of second-sight; the amazing faculties displayed by some fortune-tellers, who combined into one science chiromancy, card-reading, and horoscopy; the facts of catalepsy, and of the peculiar action of the diaphragm under certain morbid influences; all these phenomena, curious, to say the least, and all emanating from the same source, undermined much doubt, and led the most indifferent into the province of experiment. Minoret knew nothing of this movement of minds, vast in Northern Europe, though still small in France, where, nevertheless, certain facts occurred which superficial observers called marvelous, but which fell like stones to the bottom of the sea in the whirlpool of events in Paris.
At the beginning of this year the anti-Mesmerist was greatly disturbed by receiving the following letter:—
My old Comrade—Every friendship, even a lost friendship, has rights which it is not easy to set aside. I know that you are still alive, and I remember less of our hostilities than of our happy days in the little dens of Saint-Julien-le-pauvre. Now that I am about to quit this world, I cling to a hope of proving to you that magnetism is destined to be one of the most important of sciences—unless, indeed, all science should not be regarded as one. I can wreck your incredulity by positive proofs. Perhaps I may gain from your curiosity the happiness of once more clasping your hand as we used to clasp hands before the days of Mesmer.—Always yours,
The anti-Mesmerist, stung as a lion by a gadfly, rushed off to Paris and left
