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centuries of mental stagnation in the realm of medicine and general ignorance, several
determined steps in the direction of real knowledge had finally been made. Natural sciences had
achieved a decided success, and chemistry and physics were on a fair way to progress. As the
Savants of a century ago had not yet grown to that height of sublime modesty which
characterizes so pre-eminently their modern successors -- they felt very much puffed up with
their greatness. The moment for praiseworthy humility, followed by a confession of the relative
insignificance of the knowledge of the period -- and even of modern knowledge for the matter of
that -- compared to that which the ancients knew, had not yet arrived. Those were days of naive
boasting of the peacocks of science displaying in a body their tails, and demanding universal
recognition and admiration. The Sir Oracles were not as numerous as they are now, yet their
number was considerable. And indeed, had not the Dulcamaras of public fairs been just visited
with ostracism? Had not the leeches well nigh disappeared to make room for diplomaed
physicians with royal licenses to kill and bury a piacere ad libitum? Hence, the nodding
"Immortal" in his academical chair was regarded as the sole competent authority in the decision
of questions he had never studied, and for rendering verdicts about that which he had never heard
of. It was the REIGN OF REASON, and of Science -- in its teens; the beginning of the great
deadly struggle between Theology and Facts, Spirituality and Materialism. In the educated
classes of Society too much faith had been succeeded by no faith at all. The cycle of Science-
worship had just set in, with its pilgrimages to the Academy, the Olympus where the "Forty
Immortals" are enshrined, and its raids upon every one who refused to manifest a noisy
admiration, a kind of juvenile calf's enthusiasm, at the door of the Fane of Science. When
Mesmer arrived, Paris divided its allegiance between the Church which attributed all kinds of
phenomena except its own divine miracles to the Devil, and the Academy, which believed in
neither God nor Devil, but only in its own infallible wisdom.
But there were minds which would not be satisfied with either of these beliefs. Therefore, after
Mesmer had forced all Paris to crowd to his halls, waiting hours to obtain a place in the chair
round the miraculous baquet, some people thought that it was time real truth should be found
out. They had laid their legitimate desires at the royal feet, and the King forthwith commanded
his learned Academy to look into the matter. Then it was, that awakening from their chronic nap,
the "Immortals" appointed a committee of investigation, among which was Benjamin Franklin,
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STUDIES IN OCCULTISM
26
and chose some of the oldest, wisest and baldest among their "Infants" to watch over the
Committee. This was in 1784. Every one knows what was the report of the latter and the final
decision of the Academy. The whole transaction looks now like a general rehearsal of the play,
one of the acts of which was performed by the "Dialectical Society" of London and some of
England's greatest Scientists, some eighty years later.
Indeed, notwithstanding a counter report by Dr. Jussieu, an Academician of the highest rank, and
the Court physician D'Eslon, who, as eye-witnesses to the most striking phenomena, demanded
that a careful investigation should be made by the Medical Faculty of the therapeutic effects of
the magnetic fluid -- their demand fell through. The Academy disbelieved her most eminent
Scientists. Even Sir B. Franklin, so much at home with cosmic electricity, would not recognize
its fountain head and primordial source, and along with Bailly, Lavoisier, Magendie, and others,
proclaimed Mesmerism a delusion. Nor had the second investigation which followed the first --
namely in 1825 -- any better results. The report was once more squashed (vide Isis Unveiled, vol.
I, pp. 171-176).
Even now when experiment has amply demonstrated that "Mesmerism" or animal magnetism,
now known as hypnotism (a sorry effect, forsooth, of the "Breath of Cybele") is a fact, we yet
get the majority of scientists denying its actual existence. Small fry as it is in the majestic array
of experimental psycho-magnetic phenomena, even hypnotism seems too incredible, too
mysterious, for our Darwinists and Haeckelians. One needs too much moral courage, you see, to
face the suspicion of one's colleagues, the doubt of the public, and the giggling of fools.
"Mystery and charlatanism go hand in hand," they say; and "self-respect and the dignity of the
profession," as Magendie remarks in his Physiologie Humaine, "demand that the well informed
physician should remember how readily mystery glides into charlatanism." Pity the "well
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