impossible, to command without help from a personally-uninterested mind
outside of oneself.

I cannot leave this subject without a further word of solemn warning. In
my youth we had mesmerism with its cures, then we had and have
spiritualism with its like pretensions. From time to time we have had
faith-cures. They come and they go, and have no stable life. The evil
they do lives after them in the many mental wrecks they leave. When the
charlatan Newton was ordering every class of the sick to get well, I was
called upon to see case after case of the most calamitous results on
mind and body. Now and then he had the luck to meet some one who was
merely idea-sick,--a class of cases we know well. Then he made a cure
which would have been as easy to me as to him. I made much inquiry, but
could never find a case of organic disease with distinct tissue-changes
which he had cured. A man with hopeless rheumatic alterations of joints
was made to walk a few steps without crutches. This he did at sore cost
of pain, and then came to me to tell me his tale with a new set of
crutches, the healer having kept the old set as evidence of the cure.
And now we have the mind-cure, Christian science and the like,--a muddle
of mystical statements, backed by a medley of the many half-examined
facts, which show the influence of mental and moral states over certain
forms of disorder. The rarity of these makes them to be suspected.
Hardly any have the solid base of a thorough medical study, and we lose
sight of them at the moment of cure and learn nothing as to their
future.

The books on mind-cure are calculated to make much and serious evil. I
have read them with care, and have always risen from them with the sense
of confusion which one would have if desired to study a pattern from the
back of a piece of embroidery. There is, however, a class of minds which
delight in the fogs of mystery, and, when a book puzzles them, accept
this as evidence of depth of thought. I have been bewildered at times by
the positiveness and reasoning folly of the insane, and I think most
trained intelligences will feel that books like these mystical volumes
require an amount of care and thinking to avoid bewilderment of which
the mass of men and women are not possessed. In a few years they will be
the rarely read and dusty volumes, hid away in libraries, and consulted
only by those who undertake the sad task of writing the history of
credulity. Their creed will die