nterpoise, they concluded them to
be possessed. But it will be asked, how can there be degrees of philosophy
in practices equally insane, and which have been condemned by the common
consent of enlightened nations for near three hundred years? Insanity
there certainly was, and on a prodigious scale, in these ages; but the
judges and executioners were not so insane as the multitudes who either
believed themselves possessed by others, or believed that they themselves
exercised the power of possessing. To us, living in an age of comparative
rest from spiritual excitement, it seems almost incredible that thousands
of persons, in all ranks and conditions of life, should simultaneously
become possessed with the belief that they were in direct communication
with the devil: should cease to attend to their duties and callings,
passing their time in hysterical trances and cataleptic fits, during which
they seemed to themselves to be borne through the air to witch orgies and
assemblies for devil-worship, in deserts and mountains; and that while one
portion of society gave themselves up to these hallucinations, another
class should, with an equal abandonment of every duty of life, have
betaken themselves to mope and pine, going into convulsions, and wasting
to skeletons, under the idea of having been bewitched; yet nothing is more
certain than that it was such a frenzy as this the heads of the Church and
the temporal Government had to contend against in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. There were no mad-houses; if there had been, even to
the extent we now possess them, they would not have sufficed to hold a
tenth part of the numbers whose contact and example would have been fatal
to the peace, perhaps even to the existence, of society. If such frenzies
were, unhappily, to burst out among mankind at present, civilized nations
might transport their _energumeni_ to distant possessions; but the
middle-age magistrates had no facilities of that kind: they should deal
with the terrible plague by the only means at their disposal; and these
were, either to let the madness wear itself out, or to repress it by the
rope and faggot. If they had adopted the former course, the epidemic would
probably have passed through the usual stages of popular distempers; would
have had its access, its crisis, and decline; and when the scourge had
passed, the public would have awakened to a full sense of the madness of
which they had been the victims; but i