gic, vol. ii. p. 274.

This perplexity, in which the distinguished philosopher leaves the
judgment so equally balanced that it finds it impossible to believe, and
yet impossible to disbelieve, forms the right state of mind in which
a candid thinker should come to the examination of those more
extraordinary phenomena which he has not himself yet witnessed, but
the fair inquiry into which may be tendered to him by persons above
the imputation of quackery and fraud. Muffler, who is not the
least determined, as he is certainly one of the most distinguished,
disbelievers of mesmeric phenomena, does not appear to have witnessed,
or at least to have carefully examined, them, or he would, perhaps, have
seen that even the more extraordinary of those phenomena confirm, rather
than contradict, his own general theories, and may be explained by the
sympathies one sense has with another,--"the laws of reflection through
the medium of the brain." (Physiology of the Senses, p. 1311.) And
again by the maxim "that the mental principle, or cause of the mental
phenomena, cannot be confined to the brain, but that it exists in a
latent state in every part of the organism." (Ibid., p. 1355.) The
"nerve power," contended for by Mr. Bain, also may suggest a rational
solution of much that has seemed incredible to those physiologists who
have not condescended to sift the genuine phenomena of mesmerism from
the imposture to which, in all ages, the phenomena exhibited by what may
be called the ecstatic temperament have been applied.

(3) Descartes, L'Homme, vol. iv. p. 345. Cousin's Edition.

(4) Ibid., p. 428.

(5) Facts in Mesmerism.

(6) La Magic et l'Astrologie dans l'Antiquitd et an Moyen-Age. Par L. F.
Alfred Maury, Membre de Institut. p. 225.

(7) "She had no illusions when within doors."--Abercrombie, On the
Intellectual Powers, p. 277. (15th Edition.)

(8) Muller, Physiology of the Senses, Baley's translation, pp.
1068-1395, and elsewhere. Mr. Bain, in his thoughtful and suggestive
work on the "Senses and Intellect," makes very powerful use of these
statements in support of his proposition, which Faber advances in other
words, namely, "the return of the nervous currents exactly on their old
track in revived sensations."

(9) Perhaps it is for the reason suggested in the text, namely, that the
magician requires the interposition of a third imagination between
his own and that of the consulting believer, that any learned adept in
(