ON HEARING MESMERISM CALLED IMPIOUS.

The Rev. G. Sandby, in his valuable and interesting wok on mesmerism, has fully answered the religious objections; perhaps the following lines written by an accomplished lady, and published in a volume called “Angels’ Visits,” may be acceptable to my readers: - 1

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In conclusion, would it be deemed impertinent for an old soldier to remind parents, husbands, and wives – who, perchance, have hitherto treated with contempt the idea that a few passes made by a mesmeriser can possibly have any healing effect – that the will find in their Bible the sensible and practical appeal of Naaman’s servants :-

“My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldst thou not have done it? How much rather then, when he saith to thee, ‘Wash, and be clean.’”

Persistence

Vernon Howard told us we may have to knock on the door of Truth ten thousand times before it will answer. But it will answer, and then all the effort will be rewarded a thousand fold.

Guy Finley's The Power of Persistence

The Wisdom Held In The Ocean Of Essence

I will give you the symptoms of a patient whom I just examined. He was a man about fifty years old and his symptoms affected me in this way. I felt a trembling sensation that went down to my head and a tightness across my chest with a tendency to sigh. This made me melancholy; then my thoughts left my body and I seemed to be in space creating places and attaching my senses to the ideas I created, while my happiness and misery was in the scenes of my own creation. I could see a sort of another world like the city of New York and it seemed so plain that I really felt the difference in the society of the city. This amazed me for it was a disease and although the man's thoughts had different localities, they affected me like a disease located in the body. Here I could see how we are affected by our opinions. His mind or belief was in matter of this world and was as plain to be seen by me as my thoughts are to a mesmerized subject. To him they were spiritual and although they were the imitation of some other's ideas, they were real truth to him. He attached his senses to the things or places he had made and in them was his happiness and misery. All the above was matter except the happiness and misery-this is always what follows a belief. All the rest I say was matter and belonged to the wisdom of this world.

Illusion or Reality

Hippolyte Baraduc (1850–1909) was a French physician and parapsychologist. He is most notable for his claim that a misty form leaves the human body at the moment of death which he believed was evidence for the soul.

In France, Dr Hippolyte Baraduc and Louis Darget[did experiments in 1895 on thought photography and he produced colour photos on glass, mainly showing human fingerprints with aura forms.] attempted to photograph thoughts or psychic energy (‘the light of the soul’) simply by placing foreheads or fingers on a photographic plate. Despite refutations by experts, who argued that the results claimed by the ‘effluvists’ were merely technical accidents, these experiments continued throughout the 20th century.

An Exposition of the Involuntary Powers and Instincts of the HUMAN MIND.

John Bovee Dods (1795-1872) was a writer, philosopher, spiritualist, mesmerist, and early psychologist. He was born in New York City and died in Brooklyn (on 21 March 1872), but much of his productive life was spent in Maine. He published "Thirty Sermons", "Philosophy of Mesmerism" (New York, 1847), "Philosophy of Electrical Psychology" (1849), "Immortality Triumphant" (1852), and " Spirit Manifestations Examined and Explained" (1854)[1].

P.P. Quimby: We exist within the One Presence, the One Spirit.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby(1802-1866), who was known as "Park," was born in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and died in Belfast, Maine, where he lived most of his life. Quimby was an accomplished clockmaker, inventor, and Daguerreotypist. In the late 1830s, he learned of mesmerism and became an expert mesmerist. With a youth named Lucius Burkmar, he gave demonstrations of mesmerism, including to some extent its healing powers. Quimby came to question accepted theories of what was happening in mesmerism and eventually developed his own system of spiritual healing.

October, 1861, Quimby writes:

"It is twenty years since I first embarked in what was one of the greatest humbugs of the age, mesmerism. At that time the people were as superstitious about it as they were two hundred years ago in regard to witchcraft."What was the prime result of his investigations? That the human mind is amenable to suggestion, as we now say; that there are subjects capable of being put into a state which we now call hypnosis; and that the mesmeric effects are not mysterious at all, but are the results of the action of mind on mind. The alleged humbug was reduced to the operation of a principle to which we are all subject, the influence of thought.

The Quimby Manuscriptsedited by Horatio. W. Dresser - 1921