ofessors of chemistry depose to have observed in those
modern magicians, the mediums of (so-called) 'spirit manifestation.'
They state that all such mediums are of the electric temperament, thus
everywhere found allied with the ecstatic, and their power varies in
proportion as the state of the atmosphere serves to depress or augment
the electricity stored in themselves. Here, then, in the midst of
vagrant phenomena, either too hastily dismissed as altogether the tricks
of fraudful imposture, or too credulously accepted as supernatural
portents-here, at least, in one generalized fact, we may, perhaps, find
a starting point, from which inductive experiment may arrive, soon
or late, at a rational theory. But however the power of which we are
speaking (a power accorded to special physical temperament) may or may
not be accounted for by some patient student of nature, I am persuaded
that it is in that power we are to seek for whatever is not wholly
imposture, in the attributes assigned to magic or witchcraft. It is well
said, by a writer who has gone into the depth of these subjects with the
research of a scholar and the science of a pathologist, 'that if magic
had exclusively reposed on credulity and falsehood, its reign would
never have endured so long; but that its art took its origin in singular
phenomena, proper to certain affections of the nerves, or manifested in
the conditions of sleep. These phenomena, the principle of which was
at first unknown, served to root faith in magic, and often abused even
enlightened minds. The enchanters and magicians arrived, by divers
practices, at the faculty of provoking in other brains a determined
order of dreams, of engendering hallucinations of all kinds, of inducing
fits of hypnotism, trance, mania, during which the persons so affected
imagined that they saw, heard, touched, supernatural beings, conversed
with them, proved their influences, assisted at prodigies of which magic
proclaimed itself to possess the secret. The public, the enchanters,
and the enchanted were equally dupes.'(6) Accepting this explanation,
unintelligible to no physician of a practice so lengthened as mine
has been, I draw from it the corollary, that as these phenomena are
exhibited only by certain special affections, to which only certain
special constitutions are susceptible, so not in any superior faculties
of intellect, or of spiritual endowment, but in peculiar physical
temperaments, often strangely diso