Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/111

Science and Health 523 Mesmer was both discredited and dead, but mesmerists still abounded everywhere and put money in their purses. In some places where Mrs. Eddy lived in her early years, Charles Poyen was garrulous about the "Power of Mind over Matter," and in 1837 actually published his book on "Animal Magnet- ism in New England. ' ' Grimes and Dods, Stone and Andrew Jackson Davis taught and practised so assiduously that all New England marvelled at what looked like miracles and gossiped interminably about phenomena, which psychical specialists on either side the ocean have lately in many instances more lucidly explained. Only five miles from the place where Mrs. Eddy lived from her fifteenth to her twenty-second year, the Shakers at Canter- bury were still under the spell of their aggressive leader, Ann Lee, who had died some time before, but of whom her followers still spoke as "Mother," the "divine spiritual intuition repre- senting the Mother in Deity, " " the type of God's Motherhood, ' ' "the female Christ," "the Father-Mother God." Meanwhile in 1832, Emerson, twenty-nine years old, had visited at Craigenputtock the compelling Carlyle and had been profoundly moved by his magniloquent and thundering an- nouncement that "God is in every man," at a time when Newman at Oxford with mellifluous words was assuring Anglicans that "Admit a God, and you introduce among the subjects of your knowledge a fact encompassing, closing in upon, absorbing every other fact conceivable." When Emerson returned to Boston he was already saturated with the immanence of God and all but lost in the Oversoul of pantheism. Not altogether with his approbation, transcenden- talism was born and speedily became a cult too often so gro- tesquely expounded by the eccentric, that without actual abandonment of its fundamental principles, he once designated it as "the saturnalia, or excess of faith." A. Bronson Alcott made himself — as many were to find — its "tedious archangel." To transcendentalism — as he ex- plained it — ^he attached his peculiar views on "vegetarianism" and his well-known opposition to all drugs at a time when the practice of medicine, when not guesswork ameliorated by the saving grace of common sense, was often the placebo mechanically administered or the blood-letting, which for a