CHAPTER XIX. MESMERISM INSUFFICIENT.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Brownson, Orestes Augustus
Cedere sede jubet, tristemque redire sub Orcum;
Aris ergo dehinc tacitus abscedito nostris.
The Hebrew youth, himself God and master of the gods, had reduced them to silence. Whence this third intelligence? It cannot come from the odic agent, for that is unintelligent.”
“I do not agree with Mr. Sowerby,” said Mr. Winslow. “I believe all existence is intelligent, and all forces intelligent forces. God is infinite intelligence. He is the principle and similitude of all things, and therefore every thing must, like him, be intelligent.”
“That was my view,” said I, “or else I should have had no hesitation in explaining a large portion of the mysterious phenomena by the old notion of demonic invasion.”
“Yet this view,” replied Mr. Merton, “is decidedly untenable. God, in the sense of creator, is the principleprinciple of all things, and in the sense that the ideas or types after which he creates them are in his eternal reason, he is their similitude; but it is not necessary to suppose that every creature imitates him in all his attributes, which would suppose that a cabbage has intellect and will, and a granite block is endowed with charity. The infinite intelligence of God supposes that all are created, ordered, and governed by, and according to, intelligence, but not that every creature is intelligent, or an intelligence. We might as well say that every creature is infinite, for God is infinity, as well as intelligence.
“In the phenomena of demonopathy the patient is distinctly conscious of an intelligence not his own. The Mother Superior in the convent of Loudun was distinctly conscious that the words spoken by her organs did not proceed from her intelligence, and that they were uttered, not by her will, but against it. There is a thousand times more evidence of this third intelligence, and that it is personal, than Baron Reichenbach has adduced in proof of his odic agent. The nuns of Loudun knew what they did, and they struggled with all their might against the power that afflicted them. They knew as well that their words and actions proceeded from a foreign personality, and not from themselves, as you know that my words and actions do not proceed from you. They held in the greatest horror the blasphemous words their organs were made to utter, and the indecent postures they were made to assume, and sought deliverance by prayer and pious practices. That does not proceed from one’s own will, which he holds in horror, and struggles against.”
“The will and intelligence was that of Grandier, who mesmerized them. He, by the mesmeric agent, had placed himself in relation with them, and he moved them as a mesmerizer does his somnambulist,” said Mr. Sowerby.
“That Grandier persecuted them, and was in some sense near them, is what they uniformly asserted, and what I am not disposed to deny, but that it was he who possessed them, and used their organs, is not to be supposed; because one human being cannot thus possess another, and because the intelligence and will displayed surpassed his own. Grandier, if he afflicted them, did it only by means of a foreign power, foreign both to his personality and theirs, as even Mr. Sowerby contends; but this foreign power must have had, as is evident from the recorded phenomena, intelligence and will of its own.”
After a long discussion on this point, which I had hardly for a moment questioned, for I had proved it by my experiments with Priscilla, and with tables and inanimate objects, time and again, though I saw not all that it involved, all except the Doctor and Jack agreed that it must be so. The Doctor would not make an admission that required him to modify what he had written and published on insanity, and Jack would not hear a word on the subject. His experience was explicable on the assumption of hallucination, and he would not believe anybody had had a more marvellous experience than his own.
“But,” said Mr. Merton, “this wonder-working power, if it have intelligence and will, must be a spirit, good or bad, and, also a superhuman spirit, since the phenomena are superhuman.”
“So,” said Dr. Corning, “here we are in the middle of the nineteenth century, in this age of science, after so much has been said and written against the folly, ignorance, barbarism, and superstition of past ages, back in the old superstitious belief in demons, good and bad angels, ghosts and hobgoblins, fairies and ghouls, witches and witchcraft, sorcery and magic. Well, gentlemen, I have done. I am inclined to believe there must be a devil, for if there were no devil we could hardly have such poor success in bringing the world to reason, and curing it of superstition.”
“There may be more truth in what you say than you suspect,” said Mr. Merton. “The devil is the father of ignorance, credulity, and superstition, no less than of false science, infidelity, and irreligion.”