on under the laws of induction,
as if it had been more probable beforehand." If the mesmerized can
project, and that apparently without effort, their minds into the
minds of others--read their thoughts; if they can see and tell what is
going on hundreds of miles off, on the sea and on distant lands alike;
if they can at remote distances _influence_ others with a sense of
their presence--they possess a power so very similar to that ascribed,
in some extraordinary cases, to persons who, in a dying state, have
declared that they have been absent and conversed with individuals
dear to them in distant countries, and whose presence has been
recognised at those very times by the persons so said to be visited,
that I do not see how they can be referable to different original
phenomena. Yet with this fact before them, supposing the facts of
mesmerism, of the mind's separation from, and independence of its
organic frame, is it not extraordinary that so many of this new school
are, or profess themselves by their writings, materialists? I would,
however, use the argument of mesmerism thus:--Mesmerism, if true,
confirms the ghost and vision power, though I cannot admit that
dreams, ghosts, and visions are any confirmation of mesmerism; for if
mesmerism be a delusion and cheat, it may have arisen from speculating
upon the other known power--as true miracles have been known to give
rise to false. In cases of mesmerism, however, this shock is felt--the
facts, as facts in the ordinary sense, are incredible; but then I see
persons who have examined the matter very nicely, whom I have known,
some intimately, for many years, of whose good sense, judgement, and
_veracity_ I will not allow myself to doubt--indeed to doubt whose
veracity would be more incredible to me than the mesmeric facts
themselves. Here is a conflict--a shock. Two contradictory
impossibilities come together. I do not weigh in the scale at all the
discovery of some cheats and pretenders; this was from the first to
have been expected. In truth, the discoveries of trick and collusion
are, after all, few. Not only has mesmerism been examined into by
persons I respect, but practised likewise; and by one, a physician,
whom I have known intimately many years, who, to his own detriment,
has pursued it, and whom I have ever considered one of the most
truthful persons living, and incapable of collusion, or knowingly in
any way deceiving. Now, Eusebius, we cannot go into society, an