French government and two commissions presented their reports, neither
of which was favourable. Imagination, not magnetism, they said,
accounted for the results. His popularity wore away markedly when he
undertook to explain his method and reveal his secrets. He left Paris in
1815 and lapsed into obscurity.

_The Scientific Investigation of Mesmerism in France_

As has been said, there are two lines of development growing out of
Mesmer and his methods. Ten years after Mesmer left Paris Alexandre
Bertrand pointed out that after the elimination of errors due to fraud
or mal-observation, the results which Mesmer and his associates had
produced were due not to animal magnetism, but to expectation induced by
suggestion and intensified by the peculiar setting which Mesmer had
contrived for his so-called treatments. The schools of medicine were
slow to follow out Bertrand's discovery and it was not until something
like twenty years later, through the studies of Braid, that hypnotism
began to be taken seriously.

But once the matter was brought broadly before them, the doctors began
to follow it through. Charcot, in the Salpetriere, used hypnotic
suggestion for the correction of abnormal mental and nervous states. The
psychologists took up the matter and hypnotic suggestion has come to be
not only a legitimate subject for the investigation of the student and
an accepted method in correction of abnormal mental states, but as it
were a window through which we are beginning to see deeply into
unsuspected depths and intricacies of personality.

Modern faith healing cults, however, have not come to us down this line,
though the studies of Bertrand, Braid, Charcot, Du Bois and their
associates supply the interpretative principles for any real
understanding of them. Mesmerism naturally appealed to the type of mind
most easily attracted by the bizarre and the mysterious. There are
always amongst us the credulous and curious who find little enough
either to awe or inspire them in the broad sweep of law, or in such
facts as lie open to the light of reason. Such as these are impatient of
discipline, eager to free themselves from the sequence of cause and
effect; they are impressed by the occult powers and seek short cuts to
health, or goodness, or wisdom. They delight to build up, out of their
own inner consciousness, systems which have little contact with reality
and which, through their very tenuousness, are as incapable of dispro