ibility. 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 quantity, 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 space of some seconds; to-morrow
they may require several entire hours; and finally, on another day,
other circumstances 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
assimilation, 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