Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men Part 12

There are cases in which every thing must first be disordered, to enable us to restore order ... but the shock must be unique ... whereas in the public treatment by magnetism ... the habit of the crises cannot but be injurious."

This thought related to the most delicate considerations. It was developed in a report addressed to the king personally. This report was to have remained secret, but it was published some years since. It should not be regretted; the magnetic treatment, regarded in a certain point of view, pleased sick people much; they are now aware of all its dangers.

In conclusion, Bailly's report completely upsets an accredited error.

This was an important service, nor was it the only one. In searching for the imaginary cause of animal magnetism, they ascertained the real power that man can exert over man, without the immediate and demonstrable intervention of any physical agent; they established that "the most simple actions and signs sometimes produce most powerful effects; that man's action on the imagination may be reduced to an art ... at least in regard to persons who have faith." This work finally showed how our faculties should be experimentally studied; in what way psychology may one day come to be placed among the exact sciences.

I have always regretted that the commissioners did not judge it expedient to add a historical chapter to their excellent work. The immense erudition of Bailly would have given it an inestimable value. I figure to myself, also, that in seeing the Mesmeric practices that have now been in use during upwards of two thousand years, the public would have asked itself whether so long an interval of time had ever been required to push a good and useful thing forward into estimation. By circ.u.mscribing himself to this point of view, a few traits would have sufficed.

Plutarch, for example, would have come to the aid of the reporter. He would have showed him Pyrrhus curing complaints of the spleen, by means of frictions made with the great toe of his right foot. Without giving one's self up to a wild spirit of interpretation, we might be permitted to see in that fact the germ of animal magnetism. I admit that one circ.u.mstance would have rather unsettled the savant: this was the white c.o.c.k that the King of Macedon sacrificed to the G.o.ds before beginning these frictions.

Vespasian, in his turn, might have figured among the predecessors of Mesmer, in consequence of the extraordinary cures that he effected in Egypt by the action of his foot. It is true that the pretended cure of an old blindness, only by the aid of a little of that emperor's saliva, would have thrown some doubt on the veracity of Suetonius.

Homer and Achilles are not too far back but we might have invoked their names. Joachim Camerarius, indeed, a.s.serted having seen, on a very ancient copy of the Iliad, some verses that the copyists sacrificed because they did not understand them, and in which the poet alluded, not to the heel of Achilles (its celebrity has been well established these three thousand years,) but to the medical properties possessed by the great toe of that same hero's right foot.

What I regret most is, the chapter in which Bailly might have related how certain adepts of Mesmer's had the hardihood to magnetize the moon, so as, on a given day, to make all the astronomers devoted to observing that body fall into a syncope; a perturbation, by the way, that no geometer, from Newton to Laplace, had thought of.

The work of Bailly gave rise to trouble, spite, and anger, among the Mesmerists. It was for many months the target for their combined attacks. All the provinces of France saw refutations of the celebrated report arise: sometimes under the form of calm discussions, decent and moderate; but generally with all the characteristics of violence, and the acrimony of a pamphlet.

It would be labour thrown away now to go to the dusty shelves of some special library, to hunt up hundreds of pamphlets, even the t.i.tles of which are now completely forgotten. The impartial a.n.a.lysis of that ardent controversy does not call for such labour; I believe at least that I shall attain my aim, by concentrating my attention on two or three writings which, by the strength of the arguments, the merit of the style, or the reputation of their authors, have left some trace in men's minds.

In the first rank of this category of works we must place the elegant pamphlet published by Servan, under the t.i.tle 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. Undecided minds fell back into doubt and perplexity. Grimm wrote in Nov. 1784: "No cause is desperate. That of magnetism seemed as if it must fall under the reiterated attacks of medicine, of philosophy, of experience and of good sense.... Well, M. Servan, formerly the Attorney-General at Gren.o.ble, has been proving that with talent we may recover from any thing, even from ridicule."

Servan's pamphlet seemed at the time the anchor of salvation for the Mesmerists. The adepts still borrow from it their princ.i.p.al 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. If we believe him, the commissioners were called to establish a parallel between magnetism and medicine; "they were to weigh on both sides the errors and the dangers; to indicate with wise discernment what it would be desirable to preserve, and what to retrench, in the two sciences." Thus, according to Servan, the sanative art altogether would have been questioned, and the impartiality of the physicians might appear suspicious. The clever magistrate took care not to forget, on such an occasion, the eternal maxim, no one can be both judge and client. Physicians, then, ought to have been excepted.

There then follows a legitimate homage to the non-graduated academicians, members of the commission: "Before Franklin and Bailly,"

says the author, "every knee must bend. The one has invented much, the other has discovered much; Franklin belongs to the two worlds, and all ages seem to belong to Bailly." But arming himself afterwards with more cleverness than uprightness, with these words of the reporter, "The commissioners, especially the doctors, made an infinity of experiments,"

he insinuates under every form that the commissioners accepted of a very pa.s.sive line of conduct. Thus, putting aside the most positive declarations, pretending even to forget the name, the t.i.tles of the reporter, Servan no longer sees before him but one cla.s.s of adversaries, regent doctors of the Faculty of Paris, and then he gives full scope to his satirical vein. He holds it even as an honour that they do not regard him as impartial. "The doctors have killed me; what it has pleased them to leave me of life is not worth, in truth, my seeking a milder term.... For these twenty years I have always been worse through the remedies administered to me than through my maladies.... Even were animal magnetism a chimera, it should be tolerated; it would still be useful to mankind, by saving many individuals among them from the incontestable dangers of vulgar medicine.... I wish that medicine, so long accustomed to deceive itself, should still deceive itself now, and that the famous report be nothing but a great error...." Amidst these singular declarations, there are hundreds of epigrams still more remarkable by their ingenious and lively turn than by their novelty. If it were true, Gentlemen, that the medical corps had ever tried, knowingly, to impose on the vulgar, to hide the uncertainty of their knowledge, the weakness of their theories, the vagueness of their conceptions, under an obscure and pedantic jargon, the immortal and laughable sarcasms of Moliere would not have been more than an act of strict justice. In all cases every thing has its day; now, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the most delicate, the most th.o.r.n.y points of doctrine were discussed with an entire good faith, with perfect lucidity, and in a style that placed many members of the faculty in the rank Of our best speakers. Servan, however, goes beyond the limits of a scientific discussion, when, without any sort of excuse, he accuses his adversaries of being anti-mesmerists through esprit de corps, and, what is worse, through cupidity.

Servan is more in his element when he points out that the present best established medical theories occasioned at their birth prolonged debates; when he reminds us that several medicines have been alternately proscribed and recommended with vehemence: the author might even have more deeply undermined this side of his subject. Instead of some unmeaning jokes, why did he not show us, for example, in a neighbouring country, two celebrated physicians, Mead and Woodward, deciding, sword in hand, the quarrel that had arisen between them as to the purgative treatment of a patient? We should then have heard Woodward, pierced through and through, rolling on the ground, and drenched in blood, say to his adversary with an exhausted voice: "The blow was harsh, but yet I prefer it to your medicine!"

It is not truth alone that has the privilege of rendering men pa.s.sionate. Such was the legitimate result of these retrospective views.

I now ask myself whether, by labouring to put the truth of this aphorism in full light, the pa.s.sionate advocate of Mesmerism showed proof of ability!

Gentlemen, let us put all these personal attacks aside, all these recriminations against science and its agents, who unfortunately had not succeeded in restoring the health of the morose magistrate. What remains then of his pamphlet? Two chapters, only two chapters, in which Bailly's report is treated seriously. The medical commissioners and the members of the Academy had not seen, in the real effects of Mesmerism anything more than was occasioned by imagination. The celebrated magistrate exclaims on this subject, "Any one hearing this proposition spoken of would suppose, before reading the report, that the commissioners had treated and cured, or considerably relieved by the force of imagination, large tumours, inveterate obstructions, gutta serenas, and strong paralyses." Servan admitted, in short, that magnetism had effected most wonderful cures. But there lay all the question. The cures being admitted, the rest followed as a matter of course.

However incredible these cures might be, they must be admitted, they said, when numerous witnesses certified their truth. Was it owing to chance that attestations were wanting for the miracles at the Cemetery of St. Medard? Did not the counsellor to the parliament, Montgeron, state, in three large quarto volumes, the names of a great mult.i.tude of individuals who protested on their honour as illuminati, that the tomb of the Deacon, Paris, had restored sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, strength to the paralytic; that in a twinkling it cured ailing people of gouty rheumatism, of dropsy, of epilepsy, of phthisis, of abscesses, of ulcers, &c.? Did these attestations, although many emanated from persons of distinction, from the Chevalier Folard, for example, prevent the convulsionists from becoming the laughingstock of Europe? Did they not see the d.u.c.h.ess of Maine herself laugh at their prowess in the following witty couplet?--

"A scavenger at the palace-gate Who, his left heel being lame, Obtained as a most special grace, That his right should ail the same."[9]

Was not government, urged to the utmost, at last obliged to interfere, when the mult.i.tude, carrying folly to the extremest bounds, was going to try to resuscitate the dead? In short, do we not remember the amusing distich, affixed at the time to the gate of the Cemetery of St.

Medard?--

"By royal decree, we prohibit the G.o.ds To work any miracles near to these sods."[10]

Servan must have known better than any one that in regard to testimony, and in questions of complex facts, quality always carries the day over mere numbers; let us add, that quality does not result either from t.i.tles of n.o.bility, or from riches, nor from the social position, nor even from a certain sort of celebrity. What we must seek for in a witness is a calmness of mind and of feeling, a store of knowledge, and a very rare thing, notwithstanding the name it bears, common sense; on the other hand, what we must most avoid is the innate taste of some persons for the extraordinary, the wonderful, the paradoxical. Servan did not at all recollect these precepts in the criticism he wrote on Bailly's work.

We have already remarked that the Commissioners of the Academy and of the Faculty did not a.s.sert that the Mesmeric meetings were always ineffectual. They only saw in the crises the mere results of imagination; nor did any sort of magnetic fluid reveal itself to their eyes. I will also prove, that imagination alone generated the refutation that Servan gave to Bailly's theory. "You deny," exclaims the attorney-general, "you deny, gentlemen commissioners, the existence of the fluid which Mesmer has made to act such an important part! I maintain, on the contrary, not only that this fluid exists, but also that it is the medium by the aid of which all the vital functions are excited; I a.s.sert 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 individuals."

Everybody agrees that too great a flow of blood towards the brain produces a stupefaction of the mind. a.n.a.logous or inverse effects might evidently be produced 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 subject of impossibility. Their thesis was more modest; they contented themselves with saying that nothing demonstrated 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 influence that the magnetic fluid of the magnetizer might exert on the magnetized person.

In magnetism, properly so called, in that which physicists 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 quant.i.ty, when certain bodies, being present to each other, find themselves exactly in the same relative positions. 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 s.p.a.ce of some seconds; to-morrow they may require several entire hours; and finally, on another day, other circ.u.mstances remaining the same, the effect would be positively null. A certain magnetizer exercised a brisk action on a certain patient, and was absolutely powerless on another who, on the contrary, entered into a crisis under the earliest efforts of a second magnetizer.

Instead of one or two universal fluids, there must, then, to explain the phenomena, be as many distinct fluids, and constantly acting, as there exist animated or inanimate beings in the world.

The necessity of such a hypothesis evidently upset Mesmerism from its very foundations; yet the illuminati did not judge thus. All bodies became a focus of special emanations, more or less subtle, more or less abundant, and more or less dissimilar. So far the hypothesis found very few contradictors, even among rigorous minds; but soon these individual corporeal emanations were endowed, relatively towards those, (without the least appearance of proof,) either with a great power of a.s.similation, or with a decided antagonism, or with a complete neutrality; but they pretended to see in these occult qualities the material causes of the most mysterious affections of the soul. Oh! then doubt had a legitimate right to take possession of all those minds that had been taught by the strict proceedings of science not to rest satisfied with vain words. In the singular system that I have been explaining, when Corneille says,--

"There are some secret knots, some sympathies, By whose relations sweet a.s.sorted souls Attach themselves the one to the other...."[11]

and when the celebrated Spanish Jesuit Balthazar Gracian spoke of the natural relationship of minds and hearts, both the one and the other alluded, a.s.suredly without suspecting it, to the mixture, penetration, and easy crossing of two atmospheres.

"I love thee not, Sabidus," wrote Martial, "and I know not why; all that I can tell thee is, that I love thee not." Mesmerists would soon have relieved the poet from his doubts. If Martial loved not Sabidus, it was because their atmospheres could not intermingle without occasioning a kind of storm.

Plutarch informs us that the conqueror of Arminius fainted at the sight of a c.o.c.k. Antiquity was astonished at this phenomenon. What could be more simple, however? the corporeal emanations of Germanicus and of the c.o.c.k exercised a repulsive action the one on the other.

The ill.u.s.trious biographer of Cheronea declares, it is true, that the presence of the c.o.c.k was not requisite, that its crowing produced exactly the same effect on the adopted son of Tiberius. Now, the crowing may be heard a long way off; the crowing, then, would seem to possess the power of transporting the corporeal emanations of the king of the lower court with great rapidity through s.p.a.ce. The thing may appear difficult to believe. As for myself, I think it would be puerile to stop at such a difficulty; have we not leaped high over other difficulties far more embarra.s.sing?

The Marechal d'Albret was still worse off than Germanicus: the atmosphere that made him fall into a syncope exhaled from the head of a wild boar. A live, complete, whole wild boar produced no effect; but on perceiving the head of the animal detached from the body, the Marechal was struck as if with lightning. You see, gentlemen, to what sad trials military men would be exposed, if the Mesmerian theory of atmospheric conflicts were to regain favour. We ought to be carefully on our guard against a ruse de guerre, of which no one till then had ever thought,--that is, against c.o.c.ks, wild boars, &c.,--for through them an army might suddenly be deprived of its commander-in-chief. "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 a.s.serted conflicts to occur. They unhesitatingly extended their speculations to dead bodies. Some ancients dreamt that a catgut cord made of a wolf's intestines would never strike in unison with one made from a lamb's intestine; a discord of atmospheres renders the phenomenon possible. It is still a conflict of corporeal emanations that explains the other aphorism of an ancient philosopher: "The sound of a drum made with a wolf's skin takes away all sonorousness from a drum made with a lamb's skin."

Here I pause, Gentlemen. Montesquieu said: "When G.o.d created the brains of human beings, he did not intend to guarantee them."

To conclude: Servan's witty, piquant, agreeably written pamphlet was worthy under this triple claim of the reception with which the public honoured it; but it did not shake, in any one part, the lucid, majestic, elegant report by Bailly. The magistrate of Gren.o.ble has said, that in his long experience he had met men accustomed to reflect without laughing, and other men who only wished to laugh without reflecting.

Bailly thought of the first cla.s.s when he wrote his memorable report.

_The Doubts of the Provincial man_ were destined only for the other cla.s.s.

It was also to these light and laughing souls that Servan exclusively addressed himself some time after, if it be true that the _Queries of the young Doctor Rhubarbini de Purgandis_ were written by him.

Rhubarbini de Purgandis sets to work manfully. In his opinion the report by Franklin, by Lavoisier, by Bailly, is, in the scientific life of those learned men, what the _Monades_ were for Leibnitz, the _Whirlwinds_ for Descartes, the _Commentary on the Apocalypse_ for Newton. These examples may enable us to judge of the rest, and render all farther refutation unnecessary.

Bailly's report destroyed root and branch the ideas, the systems, the practices of Mesmer and of his adepts. Let us add sincerely that we have no right to appeal to him in regard to modern somnambulism. The greater portion of the phenomena now grouped around that name were neither known nor announced in 1783. A magnetizer certainly says the most improbable thing in the world, when he affirms that a given individual in the state of somnambulism can see every thing in the most profound darkness, that he can read through a wall, and even without the help of his eyes. But the improbability of these announcements does not result from the celebrated report, for Bailly does not mention such marvels, neither in praise nor dispraise; he does not say one word about them. The physicist, the doctor, the merely curious man who gives himself up to experiments in somnambulism, who thinks he must examine whether, in certain states of nervous excitement, some individuals are really endowed with extraordinary faculties; with the faculty, for example, of reading with their stomach, or with their heel; people who wish to know exactly up to what point the phenomena so boldly a.s.serted by the magnetizers of our epoch may be within the domain of rogues and sharks; all such people, we say, do not at all deny the authority of the subject in question, nor do they put themselves really in opposition to the Lavoisiers, the Franklins, or the Baillys; they dive into an entirely new world, of which those ill.u.s.trious learned men did not even suspect the existence.

I cannot approve of the mystery adopted by some grave learned men, who, in the present day, attend experiments on somnambulism. Doubt is a proof of diffidence, and has rarely been inimical to the progress of science.

We could not say the same of incredulity. He who, except in pure mathematics, p.r.o.nounces the word _impossible_, is deficient in prudence.

Reserve is especially requisite when we treat of animal organization.

Our senses, notwithstanding twenty-four centuries of study, observations, and researches, are far from being an exhausted subject.

Take, for example, the ear. A celebrated natural philosopher, Wollaston, occupied himself with it; and immediately we learn, that with an equal sensibility as regards the low notes a certain individual can hear the highest tones, whilst another cannot hear them at all; and it becomes proved that certain men, with perfectly sound organs, never heard the cricket in the chimney-corner, yet did not doubt but that bats occasionally utter a piercing cry; and attention being once awakened to these singular results, observers have found the most extraordinary differences of sensibility between their right ear and their left ear, &c.

Our vision offers phenomena not less curious, and an infinitely vaster field of research. Experience has proved, for example, that some people are absolutely blind to certain colours, as red, and enjoy perfect vision relatively to yellow, to green, and to blue. If the Newtonian theory of emission be true, we must irrevocably admit that a ray ceases to be light as soon as we diminish its velocity by one ten thousandth part. Thence flow those natural conjectures, which are well worthy of experimental examination: all men do not see by the same rays; decided differences may exist in this respect in the same individual during various nervous states; it is possible that the calorific rays, the dark rays of one person, may be the luminous rays of another person, and reciprocally; the calorific rays traverse some substances freely, which are therefore called diathermal, these substances, thus far, had been called opaque, because they transmit no ray commonly called luminous; now the words opaque and diathermal have no absolute meaning. The diathermals allow those rays to pa.s.s through which const.i.tute the light of one man; and they stop those which const.i.tute the light of another man. Perhaps in this way the key of many phenomena might be found, that till now have remained without any plausible explanation.