sorry to say, the advocates for it, upon all occasions, cast upon all who venture to doubt.
They tell you tauntingly to believe your senses; yet the senses, from experience, one is inclined to mistrust—indeed, some philosophers have absurdly laid down, that they are only given to deceive us, and are no-wise to be trusted. Without being under such philosophy, I would ask which of our senses has not deceived us? Go to a common conjuror, put them all to the test, and question them. Your eye will be positive that it saw a child rammed into a cannon, and shot into or through a wall—and the said child walks away unhurt. Your hand will assert it caught hold of a dove, and grasped at a snake—your ear tells you a person is speaking to you from a box hardly large enough to hold a mouse. Now am I not bound, when so large demands are made on my credulity, and the appeal is to my senses, to refuse to bring them alone into court as evidence? Conjurors, aware of this inroad made on their profession, have very cunningly so imitated mesmeric exhibitions, that it is hard indeed to tell the imitation from the original. Then, again, there have been some very damaging scrutinies—some impostures discovered and confessed. It is said in reply—So the priestess has been suborned, yet the belief in the oracles but little shaken. But this is assuming also the truth of the oracles—a truth in the inspiration of the priestess; and a large world of discussion is laid open to the mind, and it must travel far ere it can come to a judgment on that question. And after all, if the affirmative is reached, the mesmerist may decline to accept or associate with the spirits to which suck power shall be ascribed. For the power, if it did exist, was not human, unless, says the mesmerist, "it was mesmerism." Then we must reply—Then mesmerism, too, is not merely human.
Now it may be said, in answer to this deceit of our senses, that the argument would touch belief in miracles; and it might, with regard to pretended miracles that rest on the evidence of the senses only. But, in fact, the evidence of the senses is only one of the marks necessary to establish the truth of a miracle; whereas the conjunction of four marks are needed, as "The Short Method" so ingeniously and so undeniably proves—all which marks do combine in the Scripture miracles, and in them only. The senses are witnesses, not judges. They may be false witnesses, and even notoriously have their counterfeits in the imagination. Persons often imagine they hear, see, and feel, what in fact they do not. I want, therefore, in mesmeric cases, something more, and of a nature different from that which a conjuror can deceive me in. Mesmerism does put forth pretensions to evidence of this required character, in its spiritualities—where matter, however fine and subtle, is set aside—as in this further claim of the power of the will. If I can, without touch, motion, or breathing, will, and by willing, create; or if I can be satisfied that any one has, or ever has had, that power—is in possession of that thing a thousand times more potent than the long sought "philosopher's stone"—I must bow down before the science, worship it, and deprecate its evil influences.
I thought, when I began this paper, to be able to confine the mesmeric claims to two great attributes, though still shrouded by the human veil—Omnipresence and Omniscience; but, in proceeding, I find this power of the will exciting me boldly, and demanding to be heard. It says—It is I that can make virtue and vice; I can will (shall I write it down?) water to be wine—I can create love and hatred—I can make to come and make to go. Without a word of persuasion, I make my will the sole motive of another's action, that action being itself abhorrent to the general disposition of the person. It is I predestinate—the fur predestinatus is the creature of my will. I demand a place with your "kind of omnipresence and omniscience," and to be named "Omnipotence."
There is another view of mesmerism somewhat startling—it has a direct tendency to take from man his responsibility; for, if he can, by the hand of influence, be made virtuous or criminal, in vulgar speech, there must cease to be virtue or crime as far as
