the actor is concerned. Indeed, some medical men, looking to the brain as the material organ alone actuating man, do often, and have recently, in our courts of justice, made an irresistible impulse, incited by the diseased organ, the proof of insanity; and men who call themselves philosophers and philanthropists, adopting this theory, call upon the legislature to annul punishments. They think, from the form of the head, the man must be what he is. And this is phrenomesmerism. The organism of life does everything. I know not to what extent the writers in the Zoist may be imbued with this notion; certainly the title seems to imply, as well as much in the contents of the Zoist, that upon the materialism of life rest the great phenomena of what we were wont to call mind. "Philosophists," says a satirist, "endeavour to explode private affections, in order to make room for general philanthropy; the next step is, to remove the invidious distinction between the several parts of active matter, and to substitute philozoism (love of all that has life) for philanthropy—until which last improvement in morals is effected, we cannot attain to absolute perfection, which I hold to consist in Philo-entity, (love of all that exists.) The murderer of Kotzebue vaunted that be had given more than taken life, when he asserted that his victim was then the world and the food of worms. Whoever makes the whole of man a piece of mechanism, to be worked at will, as any other piece of mechanism denying thereby personal responsibility, whether under the philosophy of phrenology, or phreno-mesmerism, or philozoism, does, in fact, transfer the dignity of his species to a toad or an oyster, level all human distinctions, and ought to profess as much love (if the word may be used at all) for the worms that feed upon his fellow-creatures as for his fellow-creatures themselves.
It would be unfair to fasten this belief in material Zoism on all mesmerists, or on them in general; but it is as well to notice the tendency—and, to those who follow the beginnings of things to their conclusions, this tendency must be very natural; for the man that can make another, merely by the waving of his hand over an organ, do what he wills him to do, must look upon that man as a mere machine in his hands, and think of himself, that whilst in his material form as a Zoon, he has brought the subtle powers of his Zoe.—his life—to such a state of energy that he can communicate with, and overpower, all other life.
Now, as I professed in commencing this paper to hold my faith in abeyance, I must confess I find myself, after these reflections, dropped with my whole weight into the scale adverse to mesmerism. What shall weigh down the opposite scale again? first making a vacillation, a suspense, and, if possible, a decided preponderance on the other side. Wise and learned men have been its advocates—as they have advocated witchcraft, and persecuted witches. At the trial of Amy Duny and Rose Callender, at Bury-St-Edmund's, 1664, before Sir Matthew Hale, Sir Thomas Brown, who wrote against vulgar errors, is said to have declared in court, he "was clearly of opinion that the fits of the plaintiffs were natural, but heightened by the devil co-operating with the malice of the witches, at whose instance he did the villanies." He confirmed it by a similar case in Denmark, and so far influenced the jury that the two women were hanged. I begin to feel the weight of Sir Matthew Hale, and the dispenser of "Vulgar Errors" clinging to him.
The great Boyle himself attested several of the cures made by Valentine Greatrakes, in the time of Charles II.—an Irish gentleman, who professed to cure diseases by touching or stroking the parts affected, and who thereby acquired great eminence. Then I am inclined to throw against Boyle an anecdote showing that the workings of imagination may go as far—it is in a note of Granger's:—
"I was myself a witness of the powerful workings of imagination in the populace. When the waters of Glastonbury were at the height of their reputation in 1751, the following story, which scarce exceeds what I observed upon the spot, was told me by a gentleman of character,—'An old woman in the workhouse at Yeovil, who had long been a cripple, and
